And, oh, that bright eager face, the firelight enhancing its brightness! The hand that trembled despite his effort at control, the slight flush on the high cheek bones from which the summer's tan had not yet house-worn! The expressive unsteady voice that gradually steadied itself as, in the interest of reading, self-consciousness was forgotten! I bent low over my crochet; I did not want to look again at him, for I was glad, so glad for him, for his mother, for his two friends, who had had such faith in him, for myself that I could count him as a friend. This was, indeed, the beginning of fulfilment. IX For five and twenty years no man had seen in Tadoussac old André's face nor heard his voice upon the river's lower course. Both long and late within their icy caves the winters dwelt. The spring-tides, messaging the wild emancipated water's glee, rushed down to meet the short-lived summer joy, and autumn after autumn fled with torch of flaming leaf, reversed, death-heralding, far up the Saguenay's dark winding gorge--yet André came no more in all that time. And now, behold them both, in Tadoussac! old André and his dog, Pierre, le brave, or was it Pierre's son?--lean-ribbed, thin-haunched and tragic-eyed, with fell of wolf, Pierre! How well they all remembered him, le brave! The frosts were in his bones, oh, long ere this; so Pierre's offspring, then?--as large as life! And André, too, old guide and voyageur! Of notches six times ten had André cut within the shaft of one great pine that sings above that wonderful caprice of pool, and quiet river reach, and torrent wild, men long have called the Upper Saguenay. That very day when his boy's heart beat wild to suffocation, as upon the bank he landed his first salmon--nom de Dieu, no sunset glow e'er equalled in his eyes that palpitant and silver-scalèd mass of vibrant rose!--the sap from that first notch had oozed; and now they said in Tadoussac that André never knew his age! Oh, fools! What matter of a few years more or less? He counted all his years by his heart's youth, as here he was in Tadoussac to prove. "And whither away?"--"To see Mère Guillardeau?"--"To visit once again in Richelieu-en-Bas?"--"Or else Trois Rivières where long ago the maskinonge leaped for him?" "To see the Seigniory of Lamoral where lived his grandpère's seignior, lived and died?"--"A pilgrimage? Sainte Anne de Beaupré, then?"--"Or Indian Lorette just by Quebec?" The questions multiplied. "Come, tell us all." And André told them all. "'Tis true," he said, "that there upon the Upper Saguenay strange tales are rife. From o'er the distant sea the English came to camp within the wilds, and I was guide. I listened to their tales whene'er the camp-fire crackled and the snow, the feather-snow that melted from the pines, fell hissing on the glowing arch of logs."