“Perhaps so:  everything changes.”

Sainte-Helene leaned forward, resting his arms on the arms of the chair.  He wrinkled his eyelids around central points of fire.

“What is a loup-garou?”

“Does monsieur not know?  Monsieur Sainte-Helene surely knows that a loup-garou is a man-wolf.”

“A man-wolf,” mused the soldier.  “But when a person is so afflicted, is he a man or is he a wolf?”

“It is not an affliction, monsieur; it is sorcery.”

“I think you are right.  Then the wretched man-wolf is past being prayed for?”

“If one should repent”—­

“I don’t repent anything,” returned Sainte-Helene; and Gaspard’s jaw relaxed, and he had the feeling of pin-feathers in his hair.  “Is he a man or is he a wolf?” repeated the questioner.

“The loup-garou is a man, but he takes the form of a wolf.”

“Not all the time?”

“No, monsieur, not all the time?”

“Of course not.”

Gaspard experienced with us all this paradox:  that the older we grow, the more visible becomes the unseen.  In childhood the external senses are sharp; but maturity fuses flesh and spirit.  He wished for a priest, desiring to feel the arm of the Church around him.  It was late October,—­a time which might be called the yearly Sabbath of loups-garous.

“And what must a loup-garou do with himself?” pursued Sainte-Helene.  “I should take to the woods, and sit and lick my chaps, and bless my hide that I was for the time no longer a man.”

“Saints! monsieur, he goes on a chase.  He runs with his tongue lolled out, and his eyes red as blood.”

“What color are my eyes, Gaspard?”

The old Frenchman sputtered, “Monsieur, they are very black.”

Sainte-Helene drew his hand across them.

“It must be your firelight that is so red.  I have been seeing as through a glass of claret ever since I came in.”

Gaspard moved farther into the corner, the stool legs scraping the floor.  Though every hair on his body crawled with superstition, he could not suspect Le Moyne de Sainte-Helene.  Yet the familiar face altered strangely while he looked at it:  the nose sunk with sudden emaciation, and the jaws lengthened to a gaunt muzzle.  There was a crouching forward of the shoulders, as if the man were about to drop on his hands and feet.  Gaspard had once fallen down unconscious in haying time; and this recalled to him the breaking up and shimmering apart of a solid landscape.  The deep cleft mouth parted, lifting first at the corners and showing teeth, then widening to the utterance of a low howl.

Gaspard tumbled over the stool, and, seizing it by a leg, held it between himself and Sainte-Helene.

“What is the matter, Gaspard?” exclaimed the officer, clattering his scabbard against the chair as he rose, his lace and plumes and ribbons stirring anew.  Many a woman in the province had not as fine and sensitive a face as the one confronting the old habitant.