His beholders seized and dragged him out upon the floor; but he threw off their hands, sprang astride of the door-sill, and stretched himself to the flume mouth to help another man out of it.

La Vigne ran downstairs shrieking for the priest, as if he had seen witchcraft.  But the miller stood still, with the candle flaring on the floor behind him, not sure of his son Laurent in militia uniform, but trembling with some hope.

It was Madame De Mattissart’s cry to her husband which confirmed the miller’s senses.  She knew the young officer through the drenching and raggedness of his white and gold uniform; she understood how two wounded men could creep through any length of flume, from which a miller’s son would know how to turn off the water.  She had no need to ask what their sensations were, sliding down that slimy duct, or how they entered it without being seen by the enemy.  Let villagers talk over such matters, and shout and exclaim when they came to hear this strange thing.  It was enough that her husband had met her through every danger, and that he was able to stand and receive her in his arms.

Laurent’s wound was serious.  After all his exertions he fainted; but Angele took his head upon her knee, and the fathers and mothers and neighbors swarmed around him, and Father Robineau did him doctor’s service.  Every priest then on the St. Lawrence knew how to dress wounds as well as bind up spirits.

Denys of Bonaventure, notwithstanding the excitement overhead, kept men at the basement loopholes until Montgomery had long withdrawn and returned to camp.

He then felt that he could indulge himself with a sight of his son-in-law, and tiptoed up past the colony of women and children whom the priest had just driven again to their rest on the second floor; past that sacred chamber on the third floor, and on up to the flume loft.  There Monsieur De Bonaventure paused, with his head just above the boards, like a pleasant-faced sphinx.

“Accept my salutations, Captain De Mattissart,” he said laughing.  “I am told that you and this young militia-man floated down the mill-stream into this mill, with the French flag waving over your heads, to the no small discouragement of the English.  Quebec will never be taken, monsieur.”

Long ago those who found shelter in the mill dispersed to rebuild their homes under a new order of things, or wedded like Laurent and Angele, and lived their lives and died.  Yet, witnessing to all these things, the old mill stands to-day at Petit Cap, huge and cavernous; with its oasis of home, its milk-room, its square hoppers and flume-chamber unchanged.  Daylight refuses to follow you into the blackened basement; and the shouts of Montgomery’s sacking horde seem to linger in the mighty hollows overhead.

[Footnote 1:  Wolfe forbade such barbarities, but Montgomery did not always obey.  It was practiced on both sides.]

WOLFE’S COVE.