He did not groan, as at dawn, that there were no children to relieve
him of labor. A noble landscape lifted on either hand from the hollow
of Beauport. The ascending road went on to the little chapel of Ste.
Anne de Beaupré, which for thirty years had been considered a shrine
in New France. The left hand road forded the St. Charles and climbed
the long slope to Quebec rock.

Gaspard loved the sounds which made home so satisfying at autumn dusk.
Faint and far off he thought he could hear the lowing of his cow and
calf. To remember they were exiled gave him the pang of the unusual.
He was just chilled through, and therefore as ready for his own hearth
as a long journey could have made him, when a gray thing loped past in
the flinty dust, showing him sudden awful eyes and tongue of red fire.

Gaspard clapped the house door to behind him and put up the bar. He
was not afraid of Phips and the fleet, of battle or night attack, but
the terror which walked in the darkness of sorcerers' times abjectly
bowed his old legs.

"O good Ste. Anne, pray for us!" he whispered, using an invocation
familiar to his lips. "If loups-garous are abroad, also, what is to
become of this unhappy land?"

There was a rattling knock on his door. It might be made by the
hilt of a sword; or did a loup-garou ever clatter paw against man's
dwelling? Gaspard climbed on his bed.

"Father Gaspard! Father Gaspard! Are you within?"

"Who is there?"