"Yes," said John, "I saw him go by. I know the man."

"Hell of a lot of brother he's likely to find. We've tidied up the whole length of the camp front. But there's corpses yet, a mile or two below, they say. I sent him down to take his pick."

He put a question or two about the catastrophe. "Scandalous sort of bungle," he pronounced it, being alike ignorant of the strength of the rapids, and fain, as an honest soldier of Haviland's army, to take a discrediting view of anything done by Amherst's. He waxed very scornful indeed.

"Now we was allowing you didn't find the stream fast enough, by the way you kept us cooling our heels here." Perceiving that John was indisposed to quarrel, he went wearily back to his chuck-farthing.

John sat down and waited, scanning the boats as they drew to shore. Dick, whom he had left an ensign, was now adjutant of the 17th. This meant, of course, that he had done creditably and made himself felt. It meant certain promotion, too; Dick being the very man, as adjutant, to lick a regiment into shape. John could not help pondering a little, by contrast, on his own career, but without any tinge of jealousy or envy. Dick owed nothing to luck; would honestly earn or justify any favour that Fortune might grant.

The young adjutant, stepping ashore, swung round on his heel to call an order to the crowding boats. His voice, albeit John thrilled to the sound of it, was not the voice he remembered. It had hardened somehow. And his face, when John caught sight of it in profile, was not the face of a man on the sunny side of favour. It was manlier, more resolute perhaps than of old, but it had put on reserve and showed even some discontent in the set of the chin—a handsome face yet, and youthful, and full of eager strength; but with a shadow on it (thought John) that it had not worn in the days when Dick Montgomery took his young ease in Sion and criticised men and generals.

He was handling the disembarkation well. Clearly, too, his men respected and liked him. But (thought John again) who could help loving him? John had not bargained for the rush of tenderness that shook him as he stood there unperceived, and left him trembling. For a moment he longed only to escape; and then, mastered by an impulse, scarce knowing what he did, stepped forward and touched his cousin's arm.

"Dick!" he said softly.

Montgomery turned, cast a sharp glance at him, and fell back staring.

"You!" John saw the lips form the word, but no sound came. He himself was watching Dick's eyes.

Yes, as incredulity passed, joy kindled in them, and the old affection. For once in his life Richard Montgomery fairly broke down.

"Jack!"—he stretched out both hands. "We heard—You were not among the prisoners—" His voice stammered to a halt: his eyes brimmed.

"Come, and hear all about it. Oh, Dick, Dick, 'tis good to see your face again!"

They linked arms, and Dick suffered John to lead him back to the canoe among the rushes.

"My mother . . . ?" asked John, halting there by the brink.

"You haven't heard?" Dick turned his face and stared away across the river.

"I have heard nothing. . . . Is she dead?"

Dick bent his head gravely. "A year since. . . . Your brother Philip wrote the news to me. It was sudden: just a failure of the heart, he said. She had known of the danger for years, but concealed it."

John seated himself on the bank, and gazed out over the river for a minute or so in silence. "She believed me dead, of course?" he began, but did not ask how the blow had affected her. Likely enough Dick would not know. "Is there any more bad news?" he asked at length.

"None. Your brother is well, and there's another child born. The a Cleeves are not coming to an end just yet. No more questions, Jack, until you've told me all about yourself!"

He settled down to listen, and John, propping himself on an elbow, began his tale.

Twice or thrice during the narrative Dick furrowed his brows in perplexity. When, however, John came to tell of his second year's sojourn with the Ojibways, he sat up with a jerk and stared at his cousin in a blank dismay.

"But, good Lord! You said just now that this fellow—this Menehwehna—had promised to help you back to the army, as soon as Spring came. Did he break his word, then?"

"No! he would have kept his word. But I didn't want to return."

"You didn't—want—to return!" Dick repeated the words slowly, trying to grasp them. "Man alive, were you clean mad? Don't you see what cards you held? Oh," he groaned, "you're not going on to tell me that you threw them away—the chance of a life-time!"

"I don't see," answered John simply.

Dick sprang up and paced the bank with his hands clenched, half lifted. "God! if such a chance had fallen to me! You had intercepted two dispatches, one of which might have hurried the French up from Montreal here to save Fort Frontenac. Wherever you could, you bungled; but you rode on the full tide of luck. And even when you tumbled in love with this girl—oh, you needn't deny it!— even when you walked straight into the pitfall that ninety-nine men in a hundred would have seen and avoided—your very folly pulled you out of the mess! You escaped, by her grace, having foiled two dispatches and possessed your self of knowledge that might have saved Amherst from wasting ten minutes where he wasted two days. And now you stare at me when I tell you that you held the chance of a lifetime! Why, man, you could have asked what promotion you willed! Some men have luck—!" Speech failed him and he cast himself down at full length on the turf again. "Go on," he commanded grimly.

And John resumed, but in another, colder tone. The rest of the story he told perfunctorily, omitting all mention of the fight on the flagstaff tower and telling no more than was needful of the last adventure of the rapids. Either he or Dick had changed. Having begun, he persevered, but now without hope to make himself understood.

"Did ever man have such luck?" grumbled Dick. "You have made yourself a deserter. You did all you could to earn being shot; you walked back, and again did all you could to leave Amherst no other choice but to shoot you. And, again, you blunder into saving half an army! Have you seen Amherst?"

"He sent for me at La Chine, to reward me."

"You told him all, of course?"

"I did—or almost all!"

"Then, since he has not shot you, I presume you are now restored to the Forty-sixth, and become the just pride of the regiment?"

Dick's voice had become bitter with a bitterness at which John wondered; but all his answer was:

"Look at these clothes. They will tell you if I am restored to the Forty-sixth."

"So that was more than Amherst could bring himself to stomach?"

"On the contrary, he gave me my choice. But I am resigning my commission."

"Eh? Well, I suppose your monstrous luck with the dispatches had earned you his leniency. You told him of Fort Frontenac, I presume?"

"I did not tell him of that. But someone else had taken care that he should learn something of it."

"The girl? You don't mean to tell me that your luck stepped in once again?"

"Mademoiselle Diane must have guessed that I meant to tell the General all. She left a sealed letter which he opened in my presence. As for my luck," continued John—and now it was his turn to speak bitterly—"you may think how I value it when I tell you how the letter ended. With the General's help, it said, she was hiding herself for ever; and as a man of honour I must neither seek her nor hope for sight of her again."

And Dick's comment finally proved to John that between them these two years had fixed a gulf impassable. "Well, and you ought to respect her wishes," he said. "She interfered to save you, if ever a woman saved a man." He was striding to and fro again on the bank. "And what will you do now?" he demanded, halting suddenly.

"The General thinks Murray will be the new Governor, and promises to recommend me to him. There's work to be done in reducing the outlying French forts and bringing the Indians to reason. Probably I shall be sent west."

"You mean to live your life out in Canada?"

"I do."

"Tell me at least that you have given up hope of this girl."

John flushed. "I shall never seek her," he answered. "But while life lasts I shall not give up hope of seeing her once again."

"And I am waiting for my captaincy," said Dick grimly; "who with less than half your luck would have commanded a regiment!"

He swung about suddenly to confront a corporal—John's critical friend of the picket—who had come up the bank seeking him.

"Beg pardon, sir," said the corporal, saluting, "but there's a Canadian below that has found a corpse along-shore, and wants to bury him on his own account."

"That will be Bateese Guyon," said John. They walked together down the shore to the spot where Bateese bent over his brother.

"This is the man," said he, "who led us through the Roches Fendues. Respect his dead body, Dick."

"I hope," said Dick, half-lifting his hat as he stood by the corpse, "I can respect a man who did a brave deed and died for his country."



CHAPTER XXVII.

PRES-DE-VILLE.

Fifteen years have gone by, and a few months. In December 1775, on the rock of Quebec, Great Britain clung with a last desperate grip upon Canada, which on that September day in 1760 had passed so completely into her hands.

All through December the snow had fallen almost incessantly; and almost incessantly, through the short hours of daylight, the American riflemen, from their lodgings in the suburbs close under the walls, had kept up a fire on the British defenders of Quebec. For the assailants of Great Britain now were her own children; and the man who led them was a British subject still, and but three years ago had been a British officer.

Men see their duty by different lights, but Richard Montgomery had always seen his clearly. He had left the British Army for sufficient cause; had sought America, and married an American wife. He served the cause of political freedom now, and meant to serve it so as to win an imperishable name. The man whom King George had left for ten years a captain had been promoted by Congress Brigadier-General at a stroke. It recognised the greatness of which his own soul had always assured him. "Come what will," he had promised his young wife at parting, "you shall never be ashamed of me." His men adored him for his enthusiasm, his high and almost boyish courage, his dash, his bright self-confidence.

And his campaign had been a triumph. Ticonderoga and Crown Point had fallen before him. He had swept down the Richelieu, capturing St. John's, Chambly, Sorel. Montreal had capitulated without a blow. And so success had swept him on to the cliffs of Quebec—there to dash itself and fail as a spent wave.

He would not acknowledge this; not though smallpox had broken out among his troops and they, remembering that their term of service was all but expired, began to talk of home; not though his guns, mounted on frozen mounds, had utterly failed to batter a way into the city. As a subaltern he had idolised Wolfe, and here on the ground of Wolfe's triumphant stroke he still dreamed of rivalling it. In Quebec a cautious phlegmatic British General sat and waited, keeping, as the moonless nights drew on, his officers ready against surprise. For a week they had slept in their clothes and with their arms beside them.

From the lower town of Quebec a road, altered since beyond recognition, ran along the base of Cape Diamond between the cliff and the river. As it climbed it narrowed to a mere defile, known as Pres-de-Ville, having the scarped rock on one hand and on the other a precipice dropping almost to the water's edge. Across this defile the British had drawn a palisade and built, on the edge of the pass above, a small three-pounder battery, with a hangar in its rear to shelter the defenders.

Soon after midnight on the last morning of the year, a man came battling his way down from the upper town to the Pres-de-Ville barrier. A blinding snow-storm raged through the darkness, and although it blew out of the north the cliff caught its eddies and beat them back swirling about the useless lantern he carried. The freshly fallen snow encumbering his legs held him steady against the buffets of the wind; and foot by foot, feeling his way—for he could only guess how near lay the edge of the precipice—he struggled toward the stream of light issuing from the hangar.

As he reached it the squall cleared suddenly. He threw back his snow-caked hood and gazed up at the citadel on the cliff. The walls aloft there stood out brilliant against the black heavens, and he muttered approvingly; for it was he who, as Officer of the Works, had suggested to the Governor the plan of hanging out lanterns and firepots from the salient angles of the bastions; and he flattered himself that, if the enemy intended an assault up yonder, not a dog could cross the great ditch undetected.

But it appeared to him that the men in the hangar were not watching too alertly, or they would never have allowed him to draw so near unchallenged.

He was lifting a hand to hammer on the rough door giving entrance from the rear, when it was flung open and a man in provincial uniform peered out upon the night.

"Is that you, Captain Chabot?" asked the visitor.

The man in the doorway smothered an exclamation. "The wind was driving the snow in upon us by the shovelful," he explained. "We are keeping a sharp enough look-out down the road."

"So I perceived," answered John a Cleeve curtly, and stepped past him into the hangar. About fifty men stood packed there in a steam of breath around the guns—the most of them Canadians and British militiamen, with a sprinkling of petticoated sailors.

"Who is working these?" asked John a Cleeve, laying his hand on the nearest three-pounder.

"Captain Barnsfare." A red-faced seaman stepped forward and saluted awkwardly: Adam Barnsfare, master of the Tell transport.

"Your crew all right, captain?"

"All right, sir."

"The Governor sends me down with word that he believes the enemy means business to-night. Where's your artilleryman?"

"Sergeant McQuarters, sir? He stepped down, a moment since, to the barrier, to keep the sentry awake."

John a Cleeve glanced up at the lamp smoking under the beam.

"You have too much light here," he said. "If McQuarters has the guns well pointed, you need only one lantern for your lintstocks."

He blew out the candle in his own, and reaching up a hand, lowered the light until it was all but extinct. As he did so his hood fell back and the lamp-rays illumined his upturned face for two or three seconds; a tired face, pinched just now with hard living and wakefulness, but moulded and firmed by discipline. Fifteen years had bitten their lines deeply about the under-jaw and streaked the temples with grey. But they had been years of service; and, whatever he had missed in them, he had found self-reliance.

He stepped out upon the pent of the hangar, and, with another glance up at the night, plunged into the deep snow, and trudged his way down to the barricade.

"Sergeant McQuarters!"

"Here sir!" The Highlander saluted in the darkness, "Any word from up yonder, sir?" A faint glow touched the outline of his face as he lifted it toward the illuminated citadel.

"The Governor looks for an assault to-night. So you know me, McQuarters?"

"By your voice, sir," answered McQuarters, and added quaintly, "Ah, but it was different weather in those days!"

"Ay," said John, "we have come around by strange roads; you an artilleryman, and I—" He broke off, musing. For a moment, standing there knee-deep in snow, he heard the song of the waters, saw the forests again, the dripping ledges, the cool, pendant boughs, and smelt the fragrance of the young spruces. The spell of the woodland silence held him, and he listened again for the rustle of wild life in the undergrowth.

"Hist! What was that?"

"Another squall coming, sir. It's on us too, and a rasper!"

But, as the snow-charged gust swept down and blinded them in its whirl, John leaned towards McQuarters and lifted his voice sharply.

"It was more than that—Hark you!" He gripped McQuarters' arm and pointed to the barricade, over which for an instant a point of steel had glimmered. "Back, man!—back to the guns!" he yelled to the sentry. But the man was already running; and together the three floundered back to the hangar. Behind them blows were already sounding above the howl of the wind; blows of musket-butts hammering on the wooden palisade.

"Steady, men," grunted McQuarters as he reached the pent. "Give them time to break an opening—their files will be nicely huddled by this."

John a Cleeve glanced around and was satisfied. Captain Chabot had his men lined up and ready: two ranks of them, the front rank kneeling.

"Give the word, my lad," said Captain Barnsfare cheerfully, lintstock in hand.

"Fire then!—and God defend Quebec!"

The last words were lost in an explosion which seemed to lift the roof off the hangar. In the flare of it John saw the faces of the enemy—their arms outstretched and snatching at the palisade. Down upon them the grape-shot whistled, tearing through the gale it outstripped, and close on it followed the Canadians' volleys.

Barnsfare had sprung to the second gun. McQuarters nodded to him. . . .

For ten minutes the guns swept the pass. The flame of them lit up no faces now by the shivered palisade, and between the explosions came no cheering from down the road. The riflemen loaded, fired, and reloaded; but they aimed into darkness and silence.

Captain Chabot lifted a hand.

The squall had swept by. High in the citadel, drums were beating; and below, down by the waterside to the eastward, volleys of musketry crackled sharply. But no sound came up the pass of Pres-de-Ville.

"That will be at the Sault-au-Matelot barrier," said McQuarters, nodding his head in the direction of the musketry.

"We've raked decks here, anyhow," Captain Barnsfare commented, peering down the road; and one or two Canadians volunteered to descend and explore the palisade. For a while Captain Chabot demurred, fearing that the Americans might have withdrawn around the angle of the cliff and be holding themselves in ambush there.

"A couple of us could make sure of that," urged John. "They have left their wounded, at all events, as you may hear by the groans. With your leave, Captain—"

Captain Chabot yielded the point, and John with a corporal and a drummer descended the pass.

A dozen bodies lay heaped by the palisade. For the moment he could not stay to attend to them, but, passing through, followed the road down to the end of its curve around the cliff. Two corpses lay here of men who, mortally wounded, had run with the crowd before dropping to rise no more. The tracks in the snow told plainly enough that the retreat had been a stampede.

Returning to the palisade he shouted up that the coast was clear, and fell to work searching the faces of the fallen. The fresh snow, in which they lay deep, had already frozen about them; and his eye, as he swung the lantern slowly round, fell on a hand and arm which stood up stiffly above the white surface.

He stepped forward, flashing his lantern on the dead man's face—and dropped on his knees beside it.

"Do you know him, sir?" McQuarters' voice was speaking, close by.

"I know him," answered John dully, and groped and found a thin blade which lay beside the corpse. "He was my cousin, and once my best friend."

He felt the edge of the sword with his gloved hand, all the while staring at the arm pointing upwards and fixed in the rigor of death, frozen in its last gesture as Richard Montgomery had lifted it to wave forward his men. And as if the last thirty or forty minutes had never been, he found himself saying to McQuarters:

"We have come around by strange roads, sergeant, and some of us have parted with much on the way."

He looked up; but his gaze, travelling past McQuarters who stooped over the corpse, fell on the figure of a woman who had approached and halted at three paces' distance; a hooded figure in the dress of the Hospitalieres.

Something in her attitude told him that she had heard. He arose, holding the lantern high; and stared, shaking, into a face which no uncomely linen swathings could disguise from him—into eyes which death only would teach him to forget.

The fatigue-party lifted the corpse. So Richard Montgomery entered Quebec as he had promised—a General of Brigade.

The drums had ceased to call the alarm from the Citadel; musketry no longer crackled in the riverside quarter of Sault-au-Matelot. The assault had been beaten off, and close on four hundred prisoners were being marched up the hill followed by crowds of excited Quebecers. But John a Cleeve roamed the streets at random, alone, unconscious that all the while he gripped the hilt of his cousin's naked sword.

He was due to carry his report to the Governor. By and by he remembered this, and ploughed his way up the snowy incline to the Citadel. The sentry told him that the Governor was at the Seminary; had gone down half an hour ago, to number and take the names of the prisoners. John turned back.

Some two hundred prisoners were drawn up in the great hall of the Seminary, and from the doorway John spied the Governor at the far end, interrogating them.

"Eh?" Carleton turned, caught sight of him and smiled gaily. "I fancy, Mr. a Cleeve, your post is going to be a sinecure after to-night's work. Chabot reports that you were at Pres-de-Ville and discovered General Montgomery's body."

He turned at the sound of a murmur among the prisoners behind him. One or two had turned to the wall and were weeping audibly. Others stared at John and one or two pointed.

John, following their eyes, looked down at the sword in his hand and stammered an apology.

"Excuse me—I did not know that I carried it. . . . Sirs, believe me, I intended no offence! Richard Montgomery was my cousin."

From the Seminary he walked back to his quarters, meaning to snatch a few hours' sleep before daybreak. But having lit his candle, he found that he could not undress. The narrow room stifled him. He flung the sword on his bed, and went down to the streets again.

Dawn found him pacing the narrow sidewalk opposite a small log house in St. Louis Street. Lights shone from the upper storey. In the room to the right they had laid Montgomery's body, and were arraying it for burial.

The house door opened, and a lamp in the passage behind it cast a broadening ray across the snow. A woman stepped out, and, in the act of closing the door, caught sight of him. He made no doubt that she would pass up the street; but, after seeming to hesitate, she came slowly over and stood before him.

"You knew me, then?" she asked.

He bent his head humbly.

"I have seen you many times, and heard of you," she continued. "I heard what you said, down yonder. . . . Has life been so bitter for you?"

"Diane!"

He turned towards the house. "He has a noble face," she said, gazing up at the bright window.

"He was a great man."

"And yet he fought in the end against his country."

"He believed that he did right."

"Should you have believed it right?"

John was silent.

"John!"

He gave a start at the sound of his name and she smiled faintly.

"I have learnt to say it in English, you see."

"Do not mock me, mademoiselle! Fifteen years—"

"That is just what I was going to say. Fifteen years is a very long time—and—and it has not been easy for me, John. I do not think I can do without you any longer."

So in the street, under the dawn, they kissed for the first time.



EPILOGUE.



I.

HUDSON RIVER.

"Il reviendra-z a Paques, Ou—a la Trinite!"

On a summer's afternoon of the year 1818, in the deep veranda of a house terraced high above the Hudson, a small company stood expectant. Schuylers and Livingstones were there, with others of the great patroon families; one or two in complete black, and all wearing some badge of mourning. Some were young, others well advanced in middle life; but amidst them, and a little apart, reclined a lady to whose story the oldest had listened in his childhood.

She lay back in an invalid chair, with her face set toward the noble river sweeping into view around the base of a wooded bluff, and toward the line of its course beyond, where its hidden waters furrowed the forests to the northward and divided hill from hill. Yet to her eyes the landscape was but a blur, and she saw it only in memory.

For forty-three years she had worn black and a widow's goffered cap. The hair beneath it was thin now, and her body frail and very far on its decline to the grave. On the table at her elbow lay a letter beside a small field-glass, towards which, once and again, she stretched out a hand.

"It is heavy for you, aunt," said her favourite grand-niece, who stood at the back of her chair—a beautiful girl in a white frock, high-waisted and tied with a broad, black sash. "We will tell you when they come in sight."

"I know, my dear; I know. It was only to make sure."

"But you tried yesterday, and with the glass your sight was as good as mine, almost."

"Even so short a while makes a difference, now. You cannot understand that, Janet; you will, some day."

"We will tell you," the girl repeated, "as soon as ever they come in sight; perhaps before. We may see the smoke first between the trees, you know."

"Ay," the old lady answered, and added, "There was no such thing in those days." Her hand went out toward the field-glass again, and rested, trembling a little, on the edge of the table. "I thought— yesterday—that the trees had grown a good deal. They have closed in, and the river is narrower; or perhaps it looks narrower, through a glass."

The men at the far end of the veranda, who had been talking apart while they scanned the upper bends of the river, lowered their voices suddenly. They had heard a throbbing sound to the northward; either the beat of a drum or the panting stroke of a steamboat's paddles.

All waited, with their eyes on the distant woods. By and by a film of dark smoke floated up as through a crevice in the massed tree-tops, lengthened, and spread itself in the sunlight. The throbbing grew louder—the beat of a drum, slow and funereal, with the clank of paddle-wheels filling its pauses. And now—hark!— a band playing the Dead March!

The girl knelt and lifted the glass, ready focused. The failing woman leaned forward, and with fingers that trembled on the tube, directed it where the river swept broadly around the headland.

What did she see? At first an ugly steamboat nosing into view and belching smoke from its long funnel; then a double line of soldiers crowding the deck, and between their lines what seemed at first to be a black mound with a scarlet bar across it. But the mound was the plumed hearse of her husband, and the scarlet bar the striped flag of the country for which he had died—his adopted country, long since invited to her seat among the nations.

The men in the veranda had bared their heads. They heard a bell ring on board the steamboat. Her paddles ceased to rotate, and after a moment began to churn the river with reversed motion, holding the boat against its current. The troops on her deck, standing with reversed arms; the muffled drums; the half-masted flag; all saluted a hero and the widow of a hero.

So, after forty-three years, Richard Montgomery returned to the wife he had left with a promise that, come what might, she should be proud of him.

Proud she was; she, a worn old woman sitting in the shadow of death, proud of a dry skeleton and a handful of dust under a crape pall. And they had parted in the hey-day of youth, young and ardent, with arms passionately loth to untwine.

What did her eyes seek beneath the pall, the plumes, the flag? Be sure she saw him laid there at his manly length, inert, with cheeks only a little paler than they had been as he stood looking down into her eyes a moment before he strode away. In truth, the searchers, opening his grave in Quebec, had found a few bones, and a skull from which, as they lifted it, a musket-ball dropped back into the rotted coffin; these, and a lock of hair, tied with a leathern thong.

They did not bring him ashore to her. Even after forty years his return must be for a moment only; his country still claimed him. The letter beside her was from Governor Clinton, written in courtliest words, telling her of the grave in New York prepared for him beneath the cenotaph set up by Congress many years before.

Again a bell rang sharply, the paddles ceased backing and ploughed forward again. To the sound of muffled drums he passed down the river, and out of her sight for ever.



II.

THE PHANTOM GUARD.

Just a hundred years have passed since the assault on Pres-de-Ville. It is the last day of 1875, and in the Citadel above the cliff the Commandant and his lady are holding a ball. Outside the warm rooms winter binds Quebec. The St. Lawrence is frozen over, and the copings and escarpments of the old fortress sparkle white under a flying moon.

The Commandant's lady had decreed fancy dress for her dancers, and further, that their costumes shall be those of 1775. The Commandant himself wears the antique uniform of the Royal Artillery, and some of his guests salute him in the very coats, and carry the very swords, their ancestors wore this night a hundred years ago. They pass up the grand staircase hung with standards—golden leopards of England, golden irises of France, the Dominion ensign, the Stars and Stripes— and come face to face with a trophy, on the design of which Captain Larne of the B Battery has spent some pious hours. Here, above stacks of muskets piled over drums and trumpets, is draped the red and black "rebel" pennant so that its folds fall over the escutcheon of the United States; and against this hangs a sword, heavily craped, with the letters R.I.P. beneath it.

It is the same thin blade of steel which dropped on the snow, its hilt warm from Richard Montgomery's hand, as he turned to wave forward his men. His enemies salute it to-night.

They pass into the upper ballroom. They are met to dance a new year in, and the garrison band is playing a waltz of Strauss's—"Die guten alten Zeiten." So dance follows dance, and the hours fly by to midnight—outside, the moon in chase past the clouds and over fields and wastes of snow—inside, the feet of dancers warming to their work under the clustered lights.

But on the stroke of midnight a waltz ceases suddenly. From the lower ballroom the high, clear note of a trumpet rings out, silencing the music of the bandsmen. A panel has flown open there and a trumpeter steps forth blowing a call which, as it dies away, is answered by a skirl of pipes and tapping of drums from a remote corner of the barracks. The guests fall back as the sound swells on the night, drawing nearer. Pipes are shrieking now; the rattle of drums shakes the windows. Two folding doors fall wide, and through them stalks a ghostly guard headed by the ghost of Sergeant Hugh McQuarters, in kilt and tartan and cross-belt yet spotted with the blood of a brave Highlander who died in 1775, defending Quebec. The guard looks neither to right nor to left; it passes on through hall and passage and ballroom, halts beneath Montgomery's sword, salutes it in silence, and vanishes.

Some of the ladies are the least bit scared. But the men are pronouncing it a brilliant coup de theatre, and presently crowd about the trophy, discussing Montgomery and what manner of man he was.

Down in St. Louis Street the windows have been illuminated in the old house in which his body lay. Up in the Citadel the boom of guns salutes his memory.

So the world commemorates its heroes, the brave hearts and high minds that never doubted but pressed straight to their happy or unhappy goals. But some of us hear the guns saluting those who doubted and were lost, or seemed to achieve little; whose high hopes perished by the way; whom fate bound or frustrated; whom conscience or divided counsel drove athwart into paths belying their promise; whom, wrapping both in one rest, earth covers at length indifferently with its heroes.

So let these guns, a hundred years late, salute the meeting of two lovers who, before they met and were reconciled, suffered much. The flying moon crosses the fields over which they passed forth together, and a hundred winters have smoothed their tracks on the snow. There is a tradition that they sought Boisveyrac; that children were born to them there; and that they lived and died as ordinary people do. But a thriving town hides the site of the Seigniory, and their graves are not to be found.

And north of Lake Michigan there long lingered another tradition—but it has died now—of an Englishman and his wife who came at rare intervals and would live among the Ojibways for a while, accepted by them and accepting their customs; that none could predict the time of their coming or of their departure; but that the man had, in his time, been a famous killer of bears.

THE END.