int-Castin? Ask him."

"He is helping the surgeon, father."

"Poor child, how she trembles! I would thou hadst stayed in the fort,
for these sights are unfit for women. New France can as ill spare him
as we can, Clementine. Was that his groan?"

She cowered closer to the bed, and answered, "I do not know."

Saint-Denis tried to sit up in bed, but was obliged to resign himself,
with a gasp, to the straw pillows.

Night pressed against the unblinded window. A stir, not made by the
wind, was heard at the door, and Frontenac, and Frontenac's Recollet
confessor, and Sainte-Helene's two brothers from the citadel, came
into the room. The governor of New France was imposing in presence.
Perhaps there was no other officer in the province to whom he would
have galloped in such haste from Quebec. It was a tidal moment in his
affairs, and Frontenac knew the value of such moments better than
most men. But Sainte-Helene did not know the governor was there. The
Recollet father fell on his knees and at once began his office.

Longueuil sat down on Gaspard's stool and covered his face against
the wall. He had been hurt by a spent bullet, and one arm needed
bandaging, but he said nothing about it, though the surgeon was now at
liberty, standing and looking at a patient for whom nothing could be
done. The sterner brothers watched, also, silent, as Normans taught
themselves to be in trouble. The sons of Charles Le Moyne carried his
name and the lilies of France from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the
Gulf of Mexico.

Anselm de Saint-Castin had fought two days alongside the man who lay
dying. The boy had an ardent face, like his father's. He was sorry,
with the skin-deep commiseration of youth for those who fall, whose
falling thins the crowded ranks of competition. But he was not for a
moment unconscious of the girl hiding her head against her father from
the sight of death. The hope of one man forever springing beside the
grave of another must work sadness in God. Yet Sainte-Helene did not
know any young supplanter was there. He did not miss or care for
the fickle vanity of applause; he did not torment himself with the
spectres of the mind, or feel himself shrinking with the littleness of
jealousy; he did not hunger for a love that was not in the world, or
waste a Titan's passion on a human ewe any more. For him, the aching
and bewilderment, exaltations and self-distrusts, animal gladness and
subjection to the elements, were done.