Vaudreuil, down to Sir Guy Carleton. The Manor had belonged to her
husband's people seventy-five years before, and though, as a banker in
New York, Monsieur Chalice had become an American of the Americans, at
her request he had bought back from a kinsman the old place, unchanged,
furniture and all. Bringing the antique plate, china, and bric-a-brac,
made in France when Henri Quatre was king, she fared away to Quebec, set
the rude mansion in order, and was happy for a whole summer, as was her
husband, the best of fishermen and sportsmen. The Manor House stood on a
knoll, behind which, steppe on steppe, climbed the hills, till they ended
in Dalgrothe Mountain. Beyond the mountain were unexplored regions, hill
and valley floating into hill and valley, lost in a miasmic haze, ruddy,
silent, untenanted, save, mayhap, by the strange people known as the
Little Good Folk of the Scarlet Hills.

The house had been built in the seventeenth century, and the walls were
very thick, to keep out both cold and attack. Beneath the high-pointed
roof were big dormer windows, and huge chimneys flanked each side of the
house. The great roof gave a sense of crouching or hovering, for warmth
or in menace. As Valmond entered the garden, Madame Chalice was leaning
over the lower half of the entrance door, which opened latitudinally, and
was hung on large iron hinges of quaint design, made by some seventeenth-
century forgeron. Behind her deepened hospitably the spacious hall,
studded and heavy beamed, with its unpainted pine ceiling toned to a good
brown by smoke and time. Caribou and moose antlers hung along the wall,
with arquebuses, powder-horns, big shot-bags, swords, and even pieces of
armour, such as Cartier brought with him from St. Malo.

Madame Chalice looked out of this ancient avenue, a contrast, yet a
harmony; for, though her dress was modern, her person had a rare touch
of the archaic, and fitted into the picture like a piece of beautiful