They had come to shore, and the priest had stepped out upon the bank after Dominique for a few parting words. "But that is not your true reason?" He laid his hand on the young man's shoulder and looked him in the eyes. Dominique's fell. "Father," he entreated in a choking voice, "you know my secret: do not be hard on me! 'Lead us not into temptation'--" "It will not serve you to run from yours. You must do battle with it. Bethink you that, as through the Wilderness, there are more ways than one in love, and the best is that of self-denial. Mademoiselle Diane is not for you, Dominique, her father's _censitaire_: yet you may love her your life through, and do her lifelong service. To-morrow, by taking these men to Fort Amitie, you may ease her heart of its fears: and will you fail in so simple a devoir? There is too much of self in your passion, Dominique--for I will not call it love. Love finds itself in giving: but passion is always a beggar." "My Father, you do not understand--" "Who told you that I do not understand?" the priest interrupted harshly. "I too have known passion, and learnt that it is full of self and comes of Satan. Nay, is that not evident to you, seeing what mischief it has already worked in your life? Think of Bateese." "Do I ever cease thinking of Bateese? Do I ever cease fighting with myself?" Dominique's voice rose almost to a cry of pain. He stared across the water with gloomy eyes and added--it seemed quite inconsequently--"The Cascades is a bad fall, but I think it will be the Roches Fendues that gets me in the end." He said it calmly, wistfully: and, pausing for a moment, met the priest's eyes. "Your blessing, Father. I will go." He knelt. Generations of _voyageurs_, upward bound, and porting their canoes to avoid the falls, had worn a track beside the river bank. Dominique made such speed back along it that he came in sight of Boisveyrac as the bell in the little chapel of the Seigniory began to ring the Angelus. Its note came floating down the river distinct above the sound of the falls. He bared his head, and repeated his _Aves_ duly. "But all the same," he added, working out the train of his thoughts as he gazed across the deserted harvest-fields, impoverished by tree-stumps, to the dense forest behind the Chateau, "let God confound the English, and New France shall belong to a new _noblesse_ that have learned, as the old will not, to lay their hands on her wealth." CHAPTER XII. THE WHITE TUNIC. John a Cleeve lay on his bed in the guest-room of the Seigniory, listening to the sound of the distant falls. That song was his anodyne. All day he had let it lull his conscience, rousing himself irritably as from a drugged sleep to answer the questions put to him by Dominique or the priest. Dominique's questions had been few and easily answered, the most of them relating to the battle.