Jacques turned away from this renegade and threw both arms around one of the cemented pillars. Louise fell on her knees beside him, and the broad hall was filled with wailings. There were consolations which Louise remembered when her religion and her stolid sense of duty began reconciling her to the eternal absence of Claire and Dollard. She stood up and took her apron to wipe her good man’s eyes, saying without greediness and merely as seizing on a tangible fact: “Thou hast the island of St. Bernard left thee.” “But he that is gone,” sobbed Jacques, “he was to me more than the whole earth.” The four other Hurons who escaped carried all the details of the battle, except their own desertion, to Montreal. But the Iroquois were not so reticent, and in time this remnant of Hurons was brought to admit that Annahotaha alone of the tribe stood by the Frenchmen to the last. As for the Iroquois, they slunk back to their own country utterly defeated and confounded. They had no further desire to fight such an enemy. Says the historian,[12] “If seventeen Frenchmen, four Algonquins, and one Huron, behind a picket fence, could hold seven hundred warriors at bay so long, what might they expect from many such fighting behind walls of stone?” The colony of New France was redeemed out of their hands. After the struggle at the Long Saut it enjoyed such a period of rest and peace as the Iroquois had not permitted it for years. When La Mouche recovered from his wounds he crept away to his côte down the river, and with little regret the people on St. Bernard heard of him no more. Jacques and Louise remained in possession of St. Bernard, and on that island their stout-legged children played, or learned contented thrift, or followed their father in his sowing; their delight being the real priest who came with his glowing altar to teach them religion, and their terror the pretended priest in the top apartment of their house. For Mademoiselle de Granville lived many years, so indulged in her humors that the story went among neighboring seigniories that she had an insane brother whom she imprisoned on St. Bernard out of tenderness towards him, instead of sending him to some asylum in France.[13]