Front matter (continued 12)

Juliette's eyes were wet with pity for the Empress. She bent her head in assent. The boy went on, shrugging his slender shoulders:

"For me—I like better to have soldiers about me than a lot of people in embroidered tail-coats. If I had been twenty, I should have been at Wörth with the Duke of Magenta.... I would have died at the head of my troops rather than have consented to that shameful retreat.... 'Over my body!' ... that is what I would have said to them.... 'Do you wish me to dishonor the blood of Napoleon the Great?'"

He crossed to the fireplace and stood upon the Turkey hearthrug, a boyish figure reflected in the great Venetian mirror that hung above the carved stone mantelpiece. The outpouring had relieved the nervous tension; the red flush had died out of his fair temples, the smooth forehead was no longer disfigured with a scowl.

"If I might only have remained with the Army at Metz, I would have asked nothing better. But instead of staying to fight the Prussians, we drove away when they came in sight. It was ignominious.... It made me feel horribly!... And the Emperor would not show it, but I know he suffered, too. Then the camp was beastly.... There was no pretense of discipline. Their officers could hardly restrain the mobilists. There was even mutiny among those who had returned from Alsace-Lorraine—the Algerian troops of the Army of MacMahon!"

His agitation made him stutter as the words came pouring from him.

"They wanted to be led once more against the Germans!—to be avenged for all their losses and misfortunes!... I understood why they were difficult.... They did not understand why we did not march at once to the northeast frontier. No more did I.... I was unreasonable, like them! But now we are advancing—soon, soon, you will hear something!... We will effect a junction of our Army with M. de Bazaine's, and sweep the Prussians out of France!"

He was walking up and down, swinging his arms, gesticulating, grinding his heels into the arabesques of the Aubusson carpet at every turn.

"Then there will be great popular rejoicings—the Emperor will receive his due—there will be no more misunderstandings. For the Emperor is terribly misunderstood, Mademoiselle, and he is no longer young or strong.... He has so many bitter enemies.... I have heard him say so, weeping—the Emperor, Mademoiselle!..."

"Oh, hush, Monseigneur!"

But he did not heed Juliette's entreaty.

"I have heard him crying out to God in his room at midnight, when he thought everyone was asleep, and he was quite alone: 'My God! is this the beginning of the punishment? Must the price of my success be ruin, defeat, disgrace!'... Then I stole away and made a prayer for him and for myself, Mademoiselle.... I say it regularly every night since then."

His boyish pompousness, pride, and vanity had fallen from him like a tinsel diadem. Chivalry and loyalty, unselfishness and devotion shone from and irradiated the child.

"'My God, if Thou dost save up happiness for me, I pray Thee to take it away, and give it to my father, who needs it so badly.... And, my God, if Thou indeed art angry with him, I beseech Thee to grant him Thy pardon, and punish me, instead. All I ask Thee for myself is that I may know Thy Will, and obey It, that I may do my duty bravely, and die when the end of my life comes without dishonor and without fear!' Is that a good prayer, do you think, Mademoiselle?"

Before she could command herself sufficiently to answer, there was a knock at the door, and the equerry came in. He looked eager and vexed, excited and disappointed. Varying emotions seemed to clash in him. But he said, smiling and saluting as the Prince turned toward him:

"The ten minutes are over, Monseigneur!"

"Ten minutes ago, Monsieur, to speak correctly," said Monseigneur, with a mischievous look. Then his face changed. "News!" he called out eagerly. "You have dispatches from the Emperor!... Don't play a farce with me, Count, I beg of you! when there is the telegram sticking out of your cuff!"

And with the nimbleness of a gamin and the audacity of a spoiled princeling, he threw himself upon the equerry and captured the prize.

"From the Emperor at Rheims—no! don't retire, Mademoiselle! You are discreet—not like women who talk! ... You shall share my good news with me.... He says: 'There has been furious fighting at Mars la Tour. Battles are raging at Flauville, Flavigny, and Vionville. The Prince will remain for the present at Bethel, where the Emperor will rejoin him on the 27th. As it is not considered advisable to effect a junction with Bazaine, the march of the Army of Châlons is directed upon Sedan.'"

The mischief died out of the dancing eyes, the mobile face whitened with disappointment. He repeated, staring blankly at the paper:

"For what did we leave Châlons, if not to assist Bazaine?... Mon Dieu!... What infamy!... Why am I not a man?"

He grew crimson and burst into a tempest of sobbing. He tore the pale green paper into fragments and trampled them beneath his feet. His eyes blazed through the tears that streamed from them as he stammered between his gasps and chokings:

"Cowards!... Traitors!... Disgraced forever!... Is there no honor left in France?"

"Come, Mademoiselle, in pity!" entreated the equerry, as deadly pale as Monseigneur was red. He held open the door with a shaking hand, and Juliette hurriedly quitted the drawing-room. The door shut upon the sobs and outcries. The Count said, with a sigh of relief, wiping the perspiration from his face:

"You will not speak of this? His Imperial Highness is overwrought and excited. It will pass presently. Let me conduct you downstairs!"

The hall of the Prefecture reached, a servant in the livery of the establishment approached the equerry. It appeared that the lady who had accompanied Mademoiselle had recovered from her indisposition, and departed, leaving no message for her young friend.

"Madame will have returned to her hotel," said the equerry. He added: "By chance, Mademoiselle, the dispatches we have just received contain proof that your friend has been misled by false intelligence. Colonel le Bayard has not been taken prisoner. He is now in command of his regiment with the First Brigade of Cavalry of General Clérambault's Division, now engaged with the Third Corps in the neighborhood of Metz."

Then as Juliette turned red and pale, and looked at him in breathless questioning, he added, pulling a vestibule-chair from its place near the wainscot and making her sit down:

"Rest there one moment.... I will speak to Colonel Watrin. He is now at mess with his officers in the Prefect's billiard-room."

Watrin of the Bodyguard, Chief of the Prince Imperial's escort, came clanking and jingling from his dinner to confirm the fact as stated by the equerry. The 777th Chasseurs, belonging to de Clérambault's Division of the Third Corps of the Army of Bazaine, were certainly now engaged in the neighborhood of Gravelotte. But as certainly they had not come into contact with the enemy previously to the fifteenth of the month.

The fifteenth!—the very day on which Adelaide had baited her trap with an imprisoned father.... Joy at the discovery, indignation at having been so easily cajoled into captivity, brought back the red to Juliette's pale cheeks and the light to her sad eyes.

This strange, wayward, mysterious mother might exercise over her daughter a certain degree of maternal authority. The supreme obedience, the first duty was to the father, that was clear. Now she was going straight to him, wherever he might be. She was strong enough, for his dear sake, to take whatever risks were involved.

Suppose Adelaide insisted on accompanying her? It was unthinkable that even so hardy an offender should venture into the presence of one so wronged.... Meet his look!... Read in his face his scorn of perfidy! Juliette put away the possibility from her with both hands.

We know that Madame Adelaide had contemplated this very move upon occasion. But she had not met Mademoiselle de Bayard then. Since the encounter had taken place she had realized that the establishment of maternal influence, strong enough to make of her daughter a confederate and ally, was a task beyond her powers.

Her grace, her charm, were lost upon this pale, frigid, obstinate little being, in whom she saw her mother-in-law over again. For than this girl, sprung of her own flesh, whose veins were filled with her blood, nothing could be more unlike Adelaide, that magnificent creature of impulses and desires and appetites....

Dominion over de Bayard could never be regained and established while his daughter sat by his hearth a virgin unwed. Why had Adelaide hindered her marriage to M. Tessier? Pacing the Turkey carpet of the Prefect's library, Madame admitted that she had acted inadvisedly. That the plan of bringing Juliette into contact with the Prince Imperial would be discounted by the innocence of the girl and the inexperience of the boy.

She could imagine the dialogue they were holding at that moment, all, "Oh, Mademoiselle!" and "Ah, Monseigneur!"... The girl should have been permitted to celebrate her nuptials with this dull young husband of her father's choosing.... Then a few years later would have come the opportunity. She ground her teeth, thinking how her precipitation had spoiled everything ... thrust her.... Ah, Heaven! how one shuddered at the recollection, almost into the clutches of the Wielder of the Bowstring, the ingenious inventor of the Ordeal of the Looking-Glass....

Straz.... At the sight of him her heart had stopped beating. In imagination those strangling silken folds had closed, shutting out light and breath....

How he had leered, rolling those fierce black eyes of his. "So," his jeering smile had said, "my Sultana and her slave have met again. Did I not prophesy truly, sweet one, tell me? when I said you would never again look in your toilette-mirror without remembering me!"

Her nerves were raveled to threads—her will was weakening.... Despite her hatred and her overwhelming fear of the man, she knew that he was her master. That if he fixed those eyes upon her and beckoned Come! she would have to obey....

Was he still here? The book-lined walls seemed closing in on her. The atmosphere was suffocating ... she must escape from this place or go mad.

The Prefect's wife had been called away, after kindly ministrations with smelling-salts and red lavender. Adelaide opened the library door a little way, and looked forth cautiously. Except the two Cent Gardes on duty at the foot of the principal staircase, there was nobody stirring in the hall or vestibule.

As she told herself so, a red baize-covered door at a flagged rear passage-end was opened. The Prince's equerry came out with the Chief of the Bodyguard, an oblong pale green paper was in the equerry's hand. Both officers' faces were pale. Colonel Watrin's was livid and distorted with emotion. He said to his companion in a low voice, and with a despairing gesture:

"It needed but this to hasten the catastrophe!... All is over!... The Empire is lost!"

Then he went back. The red baize door shut upon him. The equerry came through the passage, entered the hall, and went quickly up the stairs. He was going to break to the Emperor's son the news of some terrible disaster ... to say to him, as Watrin had said: "All is over!... The Empire is lost!"

With all a woman's intuition, Adelaide leaped at the truth and comprehended the situation. What did she in the galley of a ruined, sinking Empire? What advantage was to be gained by reconciliation with Henri de Bayard now? And with Straz in the neighborhood, what madness to remain here....

As for the girl, she was possessed of money. Let her go to her father, or to her friends, or elsewhere....

So Adelaide went out into the hall, still haunted by horrible memories of the Roumanian. She found the porter. He hailed her fiacre from its waiting-place. Madame stepped in gracefully, and was jingled away, straight into the jaws of Straz!

"Mademoiselle is courageous," commented the Chief of the Escort when Juliette's determination to seek the shelter of her Colonel shaped itself in a request for a military pass, a thing without which nobody could penetrate the immediate area where the dreadful thing called War was actually going on. The speaker resumed:

"The Cavalry Camp of the Third Corps is at present at Châtel St. Germain.... Provided Mademoiselle gets there without accident, and can endure the noise of the bombardments—Mademoiselle may be quite as safe"—he shrugged and twirled his imperial—"there as anywhere else!..."

A little vague, more than a little doubtful, considering the huge conflict then waging, that was to wage until nightfall of the morrow, between the Imperial Army of Metz and the First and Second Armies of Germany. But the permit was written and signed with a flourish, and gracefully handed over to the keeping of Mademoiselle. Then she thanked Colonel Watrin and went away, declining the attendance of the servant whom the officer would have sent with her, and descended the steps of the Prefecture under the raking eyes of the crowd....

For, owing to a mysterious leakage in Imperial dispatches, something approaching to a panic was brewing.... The Place of the Prefecture was packed with people ... the news of the frightful struggle near Metz was buzzing from mouth to mouth. It was whispered that defeat was certain, that M. de Bismarck had a secret understanding with M. de Bazaine.... Later on, when peasants who had hurried in from villages on the outskirts, stragglers who had quitted the Army at the commencement of its misfortunes, soldiers who had deserted from the Colors in action, came flocking into the town; despite the presence of the Bodyguard and the gendarmerie, and the local Fire-Brigade, an attack upon the Imperial party at the Prefecture was anticipated; so threatening became the attitude of the people, egged on by those among them who were agents and spies of the enemy.

Perhaps the arrival of the Emperor would throw oil upon the troubled waters. Perhaps it would be wiser to warn him not to come. Well might the officers who guarded the person of the Heir of a crumbling Empire groan under the burden of their responsibilities. Well might the Prefect perspire, to the ruin of his collars and cravats.

It may be imagined that the lack of Adelaide's company did not greatly depress Mademoiselle de Bayard, as, cheered by her interview and armed with her permit, she tripped through the crowded streets to the Hotel of the Crown, where they had spent the previous night.

"Madame had already returned," said the respectable Frenchwoman in charge of the bureau. "She gave notice of departure, and asked for the account. Then the gentleman arrived—a handsome man with splendid eyes, brilliant as carbuncles, and hair and beard—my faith! what hair and what a beard! Madame cried out with ravishment upon his entrance, for he would not be announced—he went up at once. Possibly it was Madame's husband, or some near relative?"

Juliette made some ambiguous reply to the question. She was intent upon the problem of rescuing her traveling-bag. Without money one could not reach Châtel St. Germain, and in the bag was her little store of cash. Trembling, she crept upstairs to the room she had slept in, a dressing or maid's apartment, opening out of Madame's. The discovery that the door was locked and the key in Adelaide's possession was appalling. She was delivered from the dilemma by a chambermaid with a master-key. As she stole in and seized her bag she heard voices in the next room. Certainly one was Adelaide's and the other male. A thickish voice, speaking with a drawl and a muffled softness that somehow recalled the Assyrian hawk-features and fierce black eyes of Straz.

"When the little Queen of Diamonds comes," the voice said, "you shall present me!" And a chuckle followed on the words that made her cold. Fortunately, some noise in the corridor covered her retreat with her rescued property, and facilitated her departure unobserved from the Hotel of the Crown....

The station was near enough to be reached in a few minutes. She learned there that a train would leave in ten minutes for Verdun. At Verdun she would have to change, provided the branch-line trains were running, or proceed to Châtel St. Germain by road.

Those ten minutes expanded into hours as the girl sat in the dirty station, waiting. She was escaping from even greater perils than she had feared, and yet when she found herself actually in the train, and the train moving out of Bethel, she knew a moment of passionate regret.

She had been so happy there.... She would never forget, even though she lived to be an old, old woman, that half-hour spent in easy, confidential talk with her Imperial Prince.

The littered third-class carriage expanded, became the formal drawing-room of the Prefecture.... Lingeringly Mademoiselle went over the interview, and the parting—ah, me! there had been no farewell!... And yet, upon the step of departure, standing upon the muddy curbstone of the Place, full of soldiers and scowling people, she had looked wistfully up at the row of four big round-topped shining windows on the balconied first floor of the Prefecture and seen...

Only a boy's face, blurred and stained with crying. Only a boy's hand, waved behind the pane. As she whispered "Adieu!" looking up at him with passionate love and loyalty, she wondered if ever they two would meet on earth again.

It was to be never again for the boy and girl whose chivalrous and noble natures had struck out, at first meeting, the white spark that kindles to Friendship's sacred flame.

What misfortunes were coming, thick and fast, upon the luckless child of the Empire!... What a cup of dreadful judgment was to be offered to those guiltless lips!...

So young, so noble, so unfortunate! The pity of it!... He who might have breathed new life into the dry bones of the Napoleonic Legend, and given France an Emperor without fear and without reproach.

What a string of waking nightmares, the days that were to follow!... That journey by road to Mézières ... that brief sojourn at Sedan. The sudden flight to Avesnes, where the guns could be heard thundering, betokening the defeat of a demoralized, dejected army, conquered almost before the shock of battle, paralyzed by the premonition of inevitable disaster, as much as by the perfect preparedness, the masterly strategy, and the overwhelming numbers of the enemy....

From Landrécies to Maubeuge follow the boy sorrowfully....

What an hour was that when his protectors stripped him of his darling uniform, dressed him in civilian garments, took him out by the hotel back-door, and smuggled him into the omnibus that was to convey him to Belgian ground.

His father a prisoner, his mother a fugitive, crowds hustling him in their curiosity to see the son of the toppled Napoleon, what wonder that the memory of that journey haunted him his brief life long.

He was to attain manhood in exile. Transplanted to the soil of a foreign country, he was to develop into the beau-ideal of a youthful King among men. High-minded, pure-hearted, excelling in manly sports and martial exercises, the soul of honor, the fine flower of French chivalry. And in the spring of his manhood he was to die by the assegais of savage warriors, leaving nothing behind him but the broken heart of a mother, some fragrant memories, and the undying story of that lion's life-and-death fight among the trodden grasses on the banks of the Imbazani.

LVII

Following the devious route of narrow paths by which the peasant had guided them, P. C. Breagh made his way back to the battle-ground between the Bois de Vionville and the Bois de Gaumont.

Prussian spade-parties had made good progress during the three hours of his absence. Part of the field had been cleared, long parallel trenches dug at twelve-foot intervals in the soft, soaked ground, and German bodies decently interred therein. Huge canvas sacks crammed with identification-tags, papers and purses removed from these stood ready to be carted away. Volunteers and Red Cross helpers had rendered like services to dead Frenchmen. And at the head of a trench, marked by a board on which was chalked in awkward letters:

"CHASSEURS OF HORSE OF THE IMPERIAL GUARD. OFFICERS, 6; TROOPS, 200."

a single widish grave had been dug, in which had been deposited the body of de Bayard.

The place was marked by a cross made of the broken, halves of a Uhlan lance lashed with a fragment of cavalry picket-rope. About the cross Mademoiselle de Bayard's veil had been loosely tied, and the vertical shaft topped, grimly enough, with M. le Colonel's talpack. None of the heavy clay soil had been thrown back. Waiting some hand to draw Earth's rude coverlet charitably over him, de Bayard lay, staring back in the brazen face of the sun.

His green silver-braided dolman had been torn open—the blood-drenched ceinture cut, showing the mortal lance-thrust. The red, silver-striped pantaloons had been slashed at the hips, no doubt in search of pocket-book and purse. It was difficult to credit that the sternly extended right arm, and the determined frown graven deep between the eyebrows, did not mean that Life was extinct, but merely in abeyance; that the cold glitter of the bold dark eyes and the grim setting of the pale mouth under the martial mustache would not warm and soften and relax into a smile.

He was so disdainful in his rigid silence, so much a chief of men, even in death, that the disheveled scallawag who dared to love his daughter winced at the cold stare of those dark, glittering eyes. But for Juliette's sake P. C. Breagh nerved himself to the sticking point—got down into the squashy clay beside de Bayard, and took his medals, and Cross of the Legion of Honor, giving him Juliette's Rosary instead.

"You know, sir, I don't intend to take a liberty," he felt like saying: "I'm only carrying out what I've given my word to do. If I'm not quite up to your mark, please overlook it! As to being worthy of her—is any man breathing? Ask yourself the question, and the answer will be No...."

Save the Algerian, Crimean and Sardinian medals, and the Cross, nothing of value remained upon the Colonel....

Some soldier having left a spade sticking in the clay at the head of an unfinished trench, P. C. Breagh possessed himself of the utensil, and began to fill the grave in, though the dead face looked at him so haughtily that until he had covered it with the black silk veil, he boggled hideously at the task.

Winking away the tears that blinded him, and gulping down the lump that stuck in his throat, he finished. Remained but the need of a Catholic priest to read the Office. You saw the caped cloak, and the broad-brimmed hat, or the cossack and biretta of the Roman ecclesiastic, working side by side with the Jewish rabbi, the English Protestant clergyman, and the Lutheran pastor, in these harvest-fields of death. The secular priest and the tonsured religious were to be found with the Red Cross Ambulance-trains and in the temporary hospitals; doing their best for the souls and bodies of their broken fellow-men, now that War had done the worst.

To whom should one appeal? Hardly to the burly, bearded Franciscan, who passed supporting a laden double-stretcher at the upper end. You saw his brown robe hitched up under his white girdle, and his muscular bare legs, ending in boots of the elastic-sided description, stained as though he had been treading out ripe grapes in the press. An Army chaplain succeeded the monk, upright and thin, in a dark military frock and black-banded forage-cap, half leading, half carrying a French corporal of infantry, who had received a bullet through both eyes. Farther off, a gray-haired ecclesiastic, whose dress betokened his episcopal dignity, was administering the Viaticum to a dying Mecklenburg Hussar. Even as the sublime Mystery of Faith was uplifted—even as the Englishman bent the knee in adoration—his glance fell upon the kneeling figure of an old man a few yards away.

Undoubtedly a priest, the poor shepherd of some poverty-stricken country parish, for the cassock that covered the frail, wasted body was threadbare, green with wear and heavily patched. Absorbed in devotion, his broad-brimmed hat lying on the ground before him, his thin hands crossed upon his sunken breast, his white head erect, his rapt gaze fixed upon the Host, he remained immovable, until the brief but solemn rite was at an end. Then he looked up at the sky—shaking back the long white hair that had fallen about his peaked and meager features—making three times rapidly the sign of the Cross. And the serene and beautiful peace that rested on that broad furrowed forehead, the radiant smile upon the toothless mouth, and the beaming kindliness in the brilliant dark eyes that rested on P. C. Breagh's, told him that here was the needed man.

Yet he hesitated to speak to the priest, who rose and moved a few steps farther to where a shell-torn horse, tangled in the rope-harness that had attached to it a smashed artillery caisson, lay groaning and thrashing its long neck and tortured head to and fro.

Parties of Uhlans told off for the purpose, were even then shooting such hopelessly wounded victims. But no merciful bullet had ended the pain of this suffering beast. It groaned again, and coughed up blood as the old man stopped to look at it, and fixed its haggard eyes almost humanly upon his face.

The appeal went home. Stepping over the prone body of its dead comrade, the old man bent over the horse and gently stroked its neck. He said, and the words came clearly to Carolan:

"Poor creature of God! be thy sore anguish ended. In the Name of the Father ..."

As he ended the Triune Invocation, the horse's head sank down heavily. A deep sigh heaved the creature's sides, and exhaled in a gasp. The hind legs contracted sharply toward the body, and then jerked out, heavily hitting the axle of the ammunition-cart. All was over. The Samaritan moved away, but P. C. Breagh followed and overtook him, crying:

"My Father..." And the old man halted and turned himself, leaning for support upon a knotted ash-stick and saying:

"Surely, my child. Do you need my poor assistance?"

A lisping voice, speaking with a country accent. And with that smile of radiant kindness making it angelic—the face of Voltaire.

There were the features of the Philosopher of Ferney, rendered familiar to this later age by many portraits and busts. The broad and lofty brow, the great orbital arches, the mobile expressive eyes, wide-winged, sensitive hawk-beak, thin-lipped mouth, with the subtly-curving corners and the deeply cleft humorous chin, were all there. The face lacked nothing of Voltaire but cynicism and devilry. In place of these imagine a Divine simplicity, and a tenderness so pure that the young man was abashed....

"My Father," he got out: "in charity to the dead and pity for the living, will you consent to read the Office of Burial by a Catholic soldier's graveside?"

"Surely, surely, my child," nodded the wearer of the threadbare soutane. And pulled out of his pocket a red-cotton handkerchief, wrapped about a battered Office-book and a shabby stole, and trotted back beside the Englishman. Then, standing opposite to where the green and red-plumed talpack topped the broken lance-shaft, he read the Absolution, the Libera me, Paternoster and Collects, and with a wide and sweeping gesture, solemnly blessed the grave and the trenches it neighbored, saying, at the close of the De Profundis that followed, with one of those rare smiles that made the old face beautiful exceedingly:

"My poor prayers are for all my children. Now kneel and make your confession. No one will hear you—it is as though we were together in my poor little church."

"But, my Father!..." P. C. Breagh protested.

The old man said, looking at him penetratingly:

"My child, you would tell me that not so very long ago you discharged your religious obligations. But to-day is the Octave of the Assumption of Our Blessed Lady, and you have not confessed or received Communion since Whitsuntide. Will you tell me that your conscience is clear enough to meet death without apprehension, when Saints at the moment of dissolution tremble, anticipating the terrors of the Divine Judgments of God!"

Tears stood in the radiant eyes, brimmed over and ran down in two channels worn by that sorrowful-sweet smile of his.... He clasped his hands entreatingly, then threw them wide, crying in a very passion of pity and love:

"My poor child, with Death on every side of you, will you turn from Him Who is Lord and Giver of Life? And what shall I say to Him when I stand before Him, and He asks me: 'Didst thou suffer a sinner to depart whom pleadings might have won?'"

There was no resisting that passionate entreaty. Another instant, and the barrier of pride broke down. P. C. Breagh knelt in the raw, moist clay by Henri de Bayard's graveside, and poured out his full heart under the light yet thrilling pressure of those thin old hands upon his head.

With the murmured blessing that followed the Absolution the hands were withdrawn and their owner went away. How he went and whither he betook himself, his penitent never knew.

LVIII

The hamlet of Petit Plappeville lay strangely still and silent in the westering sunshine. Hitherto a small oasis of untouched ordinary life situated on the edge of a vast area of blackened devastation, it now partook in the general aspect of upheaval and ruin. The doors of the dozen cottages forming its single street stood wide open. Household! goods, furniture, clothing, broken loaves of bread, smashed and empty wine-bottles were strewed upon the street and in the little, flowery front yards. All the doors stood open, some that had been locked and driven in hung crookedly on twisted hinges, the broken windows displayed shattered splinters edging gaping holes. Not a human being showed, not a fowl pecked among the litter. The hand of the marauder had plainly been at work. P. C. Breagh groaned as he crossed the threshold of Madame Guyot's cottage, such a scene of domestic chaos housed between its denied walls.

Chests of drawers and cupboards had been ransacked of clothes and linen, these, hideously befouled, had been rent into rags and thrown upon the floor. The fragments of the Englishman's knapsack, temporarily left in Madame Guyot's keeping, the ruins of his shaving-tackle, and some stray leaves of filled note-books, deplorably appealed to their late owner's eyes. But P. C. Breagh's eyes were busied elsewhere. With the ripped-up feather bed from the inner chamber, where Juliette de Bayard had passed the previous night. With the soiled and trampled remnants of some delicate articles of feminine underwear—a lace-frilled night-robe, a filmy chemise. He took them up with reverent, shaking hands—looked instinctively for an initial.... There were letters embroidered in dainty Convent-taught stitchery—"J. M. de B."

He would have cried out, but the cry stuck in his throat, and a chilly sweat broke out upon and bathed him. He had glanced toward the corner occupied by the truckle-bed whereon my Cousin Boisset had lain. Covered with a sheet dyed partly red, something long and stark and still lay outstretched upon the palliasse. And a lance driven home to the shaft stuck upright in the body, from whose drained-out veins the last drops splashed heavily into a dreadful pool that slowly widened on the stone-flagged kitchen floor.

Something snapped in P. C. Breagh's brain at that sight. His under-jaw wrenched to one side and dropped idiotically. He yelped out wildly the name of his Infanta, and went on yelping, and could not stop:

"Juliette! Juliette! Where are you? What have they done?... Oh, Juliette!..."

And then the piercing agony of his loss and the certainty of a fate of nameless horror for her, were lost in an immense relief. Underneath the bed of death something moved and rustled. The slender thread of a voice replied:

"Monsieur Breagh, I am here! Do not be so alarmed, I beg of you! Terrible things have happened, but I am not hurt at all!"

And the ensanguined pall was pushed aside and the little figure crept out from its hiding-place. Dust and cobwebs could not dim her in the eyes of her true worshiper. He choked and made a dive to help her, stumbled and fell upon his knees as she rose to hers. And then she was in his arms, not clinging to him, but leaning against his broad chest, and shivering as though she were perishing cold. And through the chattering of her teeth he heard—did he really hear her falter:

"I knew—I knew that you would come! When a priest had been found to bless the grave of my father. Not before!... You would never have returned before!"

Her faith in him filled him with a joy that was anguish. He rose up, lifting her toward the light, but not at all releasing her.

"I came as soon as I had done my best to keep that promise. Shall I ever forget what I felt when I set my foot in at the door?... Oh, Lord!... Ten million times worse than when that luckless Angéle poisoned me!... Didn't I make sure you were dead or worse than dead!"

"It is he who is dead!" She drew her small, cold hands from his that were as icy, and went to the bed and turned back the upper end of the sheet that covered the still form. "Monsieur Breagh, you look upon a noble soldier, who gave his life for me," she said proudly, and showed the snow-white face of my Cousin Boisset.

"Wouldn't I die for you? If I got the chance!... Don't you know it?... No—how can you know it?"

Carolan clenched his hands in jealous misery, and she looked back at him to say:

"I do know it! To-day you placed yourself between me and the violence of those Prussians. I have no words to thank you for your courage, sir! Had I words for him"—she looked back at my "cousin"—"he would not hear them.... Nor can he be sensible of this——" She stooped and kissed the dead man's forehead between the boldly arching eyebrows. "Yet with all my gratitude I place it there!"

P. C. Breagh said, flushing scarlet to his hair-roots: "I would change places with him to get that—and I believe you know it! Cover him up and let me take you away from here...." He added, as she looked at him in breathless questioning, "Somewhere where you'll be safe. There must be somewhere!"

"Until night comes to cover us," she told him, "we are more safe here than anywhere. You do not think the comrades of those savage men who made this scene of desolation would halt in passing to ravage a plundered nest?"

"But here ... you can't stay here ... in all this—beastliness."

His gesture of repugnance was as forcible as the word.

She thought, and said as the outward shadows lengthened, and a deep red sunset streamed through the shattered window-panes:

"Behind the house there is a little cabane ... I should say, 'a shed,' where Madame kept her firewood. We will hide ourselves in there until the dark. For what are you looking?"

He answered, stirring the débris on the flagstones:

"For a comb and a razor for choice, out of my knapsack. No!... Except the rags of a spare jacket—they've left me nothing but this."

One stout clasped notebook had suffered little. He thrust it into his pocket and turned to Juliette. She said, with a rueful catch of the breath as she regarded the wreckage of her own property:

"Me they have not left anything at all of luggage. The little portemanteau and the sac de nuit I brought with me from Belgium ... behold their contents destroyed by those most wicked men! Is it not deplorable? Pray look, Monsieur!"

But Monsieur, suddenly seized by an attack of ultra-British prudery, had turned away to rummage in the corner of a cupboard, where perchance might lurk a loaf.

Nothing was there but a little knitted white shawl, which Juliette recognized as her own, and claimed gladly.... She threw it about her head and shoulders, and they passed out cautiously together by Madame Guyot's back door, as destitute a young couple as ever tramped. But not before Juliette de Bayard had replaced the sheet over the face of the dead gunner, and sprinkled it with holy water from a crockery stoup that hung above the bed.

"He was so good.... He should now be safe in Paradise. But we must always remember him in our prayers!..."

It would not have been wise to move about, but they could talk in whispers, partly buried in the heap of clean dry dead leaves filling half of the lean-to. Thus P. C. Breagh learned the story of the death of my Cousin Boisset, and told in return his own tale.

"You had departed, it might be one-half hour, when a man came running down the street, who cried: 'Hide! Run! The Uhlans are coming! They have plundered the Château Malakoff, and drunk M. Bénoit's eau de vie and wine!'

"This Château Malakoff is the house of a rich peasant whose vineyards have suffered much by the German guns. You will remember Madame Guyot saying so, and M. Boisset responding, full of gaiety, 'He will get all the better prices, my cousin, for the old vintages he has in store!' Naturally the outcry made much confusion, one peasant running this way and one that.... Madame Guyot caught hold of me and would have forced me to accompany her, saying that in the quarries beyond the village would be found a refuge. But I refused to leave the house!"

He broke in:

"Think what you risked! Why didn't you escape with her?"

She looked at him wonderingly:

"Why, do you ask me? ... Had I not given you my parole to stay?"

He could not speak. She went on quickly:

"So I said: 'I will remain, wearing my brassard of the Croix Rouge, and the Prussians will take me for the nurse of M. Boisset.' But when Madame and the villagers had gone, hearing the galloping of horses approaching and a howling as of wolves, that brave soldier said to me: 'Mademoiselle, when men like these are mad with wine, they care nothing for the Red Cross! Cover me over with a sheet, and hide underneath the bed I lie on. Thus they will think me dead, and possibly go away. The good God may let me save you, though I have often sinned against Him!'"

A tear brimmed over and fell on her white cheek. She brushed it off and went on:

"I obeyed, Monsieur; I locked the door, taking out the key and hiding it. Then I covered M. Boisset with the sheet, took a crucifix from the wall, and laid it on his breast. Then I got under the bed, for I heard men at the door. There was the 'tinc' of spurs and the sound of breathing. Then heavy blows struck on the door until the lock gave way.... They entered.... Monsieur Breagh, that noble man had said to me, 'For your life, do not make a sound!' For my soul, more precious than life, I could not have spoken or moved!..."

Above the narrow band of black velvet that clipped it, P. C. Breagh could see her little throat swelling. Her tragic eyes seemed to have no room for him. He waited, possessed by a strange hazy feeling that this meeting with her amidst surroundings so frightful must be taking place in a dream of uncanny vividness. That he must wake up next moment in the clean spare bedroom of the gardener's cottage, to find his garments, cleansed of soil and stain, brushed and repaired by the deft hands of the charitable Sisters, and a battered tin bath of genuinely hot water, waiting to receive the Englishman.....

"They came in," said Juliette, "talking in their guttural language. Me, I could never learn more than ten words of German at school.... But I comprehended that they were angry at finding so little in the cupboards and closets of my poor Madame Guyot. That was why they tore up clothes and linen—broke the dishes and glasses—behaved as wild beasts, rather than men. That they were drunk, I knew, though I saw their boots and not their faces. The smell of wine and brandy made me desire to be sick.... But when they approached the bed, with what anguish of apprehension I waited.... If I could have screamed, it would have been in that moment, when they pulled back the sheet...."

Her eyelids shuddered over trembling eyeballs. Her nostrils quivered with each sharply-taken breath. Her tragic upper lip shut down upon its neighbor as though it would never relax in smiles again:

"I heard my own heart beat—so loud it was like thunder. I felt M. Boisset trying to hold the breath.... I prayed to the Mother of God to cover us with Her manteau. I think she has certainly heard me when the Uhlans put back the sheet.... Alas, how terribly I am to find myself mistaken! When the Uhlan moves from the bed I believe he is about to go. Then—there is a savage cry!—a groan, hollow and terrible.... The lance comes plunging through the body of M. Boisset, through the palliasse—through the sacking that is underneath—through the sleeve of my dress, which is soaked with blood.... See!..."

And she drew out a fold of the loose sleeve, and showed the rent made by the steel in it and the wet red patches fast drying into brownish stains. And he who saw could only choke out, as his brows scowled and his yellow-flecked eyes burned tigerishly:

"The brutes!... The cowardly beggars! Oh, if I had only been there!"

"Of what use?" she said. "They would only have killed you!"

"An Englishman," he blustered: "I'd like to have had them try! Why, we're neutral. No Germans would dare——"

She said, bending her great black brows upon him, and sternly drawing down her upper lip:

"Monsieur, they would have killed you, as they killed my father. They have no pity, these men with panther hearts. How should they, when he has none—that soldier-Minister whom Germany worships to idolatry. Contradict me—say that I am wrong—to convince me would be impossible. For I read the soul of Count Bismarck when I looked him in the face."

For the owner of the domineering voice that had roused her from her stupor of misery was for Juliette de Bayard a very Moloch, ravenous for flesh of men, insatiable in thirst for blood. And comprehending this, P. C. Breagh put forth no plea for a more tolerant judgment of his erstwhile hero, beyond lamely saying:

"He's a great man—a terribly great man, however you look at him. And he—do you know, he saved my life once!"

She said, with her deeply cut nostrils swelling and quivering:

"Our Lord will say to him upon the Day of Judgment, 'You saved this one. How many others have you given to death?'"

Then, as P. C. Breagh winced at the brief, semi-contemptuous 'This one,' Juliette healed the wound with one gentle glance. The delicate voice crept to his sore heart soothingly:

"But for that rescue, I should now be quite alone in my great misery. I think that God permitted it, knowing this day upon its way to me."

P. C. Breagh said, tingling all over:

"Do you really believe that?..."

She answered simply and directly:

"If I did not, I would not say it.... Now I will shut my eyes and rest a little. I am so very tired, me!"

And she leaned back with lowered lashes on her rustling pillow of last year's dead leaves. He asked himself what had she not gone through on this day, poor fragile, tender child!

Had the news of her father's death been brought to her in London or Paris, there would have been closed doors, a darkened chamber for the mourner, the presence of some well-loved consoler, the counsel of her director, the silent sympathy of understanding friends.

But here, where every custom and conventionality was suspended or shattered—where human life was bared to the bedrock by the furious struggle of nations in War, she had sought for a wounded warrior, to find a bloody corpse amidst a jumble of other corpses, and returned from that overwhelming experience to sit with strangers at a peasant's board.

No wonder Juliette was very tired. Would her reason suffer from the results of this shock? Would she droop and die of the horrors undergone? Was it possible that in a body so frail there dwelt an indomitable and unconquerable spirit? It had looked out of her stern eyes, it had sat upon her lips when she had spoken of the Iron Chancellor.

Even as P. C. Breagh leaned toward the small white face, brooding over it, breathlessly studying it, she opened sapphire eyes upon him, to say, with the suddenness of a child:

"I have been told that the Crown Prince of Prussia is good and has a noble nature. Do you not think that if he knew how wickedly those Uhlans have killed the poor M. Boisset he would without mercy have them shot?"

P. C. Breagh, caught staring, confusedly opined so. She said, her heavy eyelids weighed down with drowsiness:

"They were cowards, for they took the alarm and mounted and rode away calling that the Franzosen were coming.... Yet when they had gone and I crept out from my concealment, what do you imagine is all that I view? In effect, nothing more terrible than an old, bent, white-haired priest in a ragged soutane, who was walking through the village saying his Rosary...."

She went on, as P. C. Breagh pricked his ears, and opened his eyes widely:

"He looked so good and like the pictures of the holy Curé d'Ars, for whose intercession I had been praying, that I cried to him: 'Help, my Father! Help for one dying! Help for another in misery!' But he must have been less holy than he looked, or very deaf, for he passed on. Then I crept back under the bed, and then—at last, you came to me. What should I have done if you had not come, Monsieur?..."

For once Carolan did not hear her. His thoughts were busy elsewhere. He was asking himself if the old priest in the patched cassock who had shown himself to Juliette, could be the Curé who had read the Office at the grave of de Bayard?

And if that priest were mortal man, how had he covered the distance between the battlefield and Petit Plappeville, and what had scared the drunken marauders from their prey? And was it not strange that the resemblance to the saint of Ars had appealed to both Carolan and Juliette?... The problem must remain unsolved for all Time, it might be.

Yet this fact had stamped itself on P. C. Breagh's consciousness, deeply as his own heavy nailed boots had bitten into the clay by the Colonel's graveside. On the moist surface of the spot where the Servant of Heaven had been standing, the clumsy iron-buckled, wooden-soled shoes had left no print at all.

An interesting illusion, bred of the exaltation of the senses under emotion, produced in part, says my friend the Physiologist, by subconscious Memory. A significant phenomenon, remarks my other friend, the student of Psychology, testifying to the thinness of the Veil dividing the Visible World from the Unseen. While my Catholic terms it a rare but not isolated or uncommon revelation, pointing the stupendous truth contained in that clause of the Credo referring to the Communion of Saints and illustrating the dynamic force of Prayer.

LIX

Juliette breathed so evenly, and lay so long without moving, that P. C. Breagh believed her asleep. Twilight showed nothing but a black shape, vaguely feminine, a pale oval patch represented her face....

Suddenly as before, her eyes opened and met his. She said, following up some previous train of thought:

"It is nobler than the portraits, and yet more pitiless. I speak of the face of my country's enemy.... See you well, Monsieur Breagh ... if I were Our Lady, I would never rise from my knees until Our Lord had saved France!..."

"What would save France?" Carolan asked her. She answered, turning in her rustling couch of leaves:

"Death, striking the hand that slowly strangles her.... Death, freezing the brain that plans her fall.... Death, overtaking the merciless giver of Death to her children.... Nothing else could now save France!..."

He who heard was dumb, knowing that this harping was the very note of madness. She went on, speaking with somber earnestness:

"Always is it that women are accused by men of weakness. Frenchwomen are, in addition, termed 'timid and frivolous.' Yet France has twice been saved by the courage of her daughters.... Remember the holy Jeanne d'Arc, beloved of God and Our Lady ... and Charlotte Corday also, Monsieur!—the courageous citizeness of Caen.... At school I learned her words, spoken before the Revolutionary Tribunal.... 'Me, I have slain one man to save a hundred thousand!...' Why has not France a Charlotte Corday now?"

There was something in her tone that menaced like the flicker of lightning, seen through a rent in stormy wrack. That a creature so frail and slender should dream of heroic vengeance was incredible. One would have expected it from a heroine of the Krimhilde-Brünhilde type. To divert her from the dangerous theme by changing the conversation was impossible. The only thing to do was to feign to doze.

He yawned, stretched his aching body on the clean dry litter, shut his hot and sandy eyes, seeing rings of green-blue fire. Oblivion descended on him. Pretense became reality. He sank into a very gulf of sleep.

Long after her comrade's heavy respiration had told her that he was wrapped in slumber, Juliette Bayard sat staring out into the deepening dusk. Insomnia born of nervous strain and mental shock claimed her as a victim. She was far more near to madness than Carolan had dreamed.

It was a night of chilly breathings from the northwest, and violent contrasts in light and shadow; a high bright moon making black silhouettes of hills and trees, and bottomless infernos of hollows and ravines. Gigantesque clouds up-piled monstrous ramparts on the southeast horizon, others topped these with the strangest sculpturesque shapes.... An iceberg with a veiled crouching figure on it; a mammoth with elevated trunk and great curved tusks, bellowing in dumb show; wrestling shapes of Titans prone or erect; lovely children playing in meadows of asphodel; vast winged shapes of genii with hidden faces, speeding across unthinkable distances of cold, crystal-blue atmosphere.

But the cloud-shape that most persistently recurred was that of a heavy-browed, mustached Colossus, who sometimes was helmed and cuirassed, and bestrode a monstrous horse of war. In other vaporous pictures he addressed great multitudes from a high rostrum, or from some fantastic hill-peak urged on rushing armies; or sometimes counseled a crowned figure that sat upon a high-placed throne.

Yet whatever the giant was, there was sure to be another figure, slender, weak, fragile, a mere vaporous wisp of mist. And the watcher had strange cognizance that this was the appointed Fate of Colossus, and that her constant presence was an augury of ill for him.

He walked amid trees in a wood, and his Fate dogged his footsteps, a pistol or poignard ready for her country's enemy.... He ate at a daïs-table in a banqueting hall—she served him a golden cup of wine iced and poisoned. ... He lay down to sleep on a lordly bed, the frail shape glided in with a torch and fired the curtains.... He dreamed of Power on the brink of a precipice, and his tiny Fate crept near unseen, and thrust him screaming down.

The moon had long southed, the cloud-shapes were growing vaguer, the eyes of the stars looked through their thinning veils. The wind had fallen, the silence was profound and awful. She shuddered, thinking of the battlefield....

What of de Bayard lying under his clay coverlet? What of the thousands of bodies buried in the newly-dug trenches? What of the myriads yet unburied, lying stark and awful under the canopy of Night?

Did they understand, the Dead, whose hand had really poured red life from them, and thrown them like empty, broken vessels abroad upon the trodden fields? Did they curse him with their stiff, silent lips, and point at him with their rigid fingers? Would they know, in Paradise or Purgatory, if anyone avenged them? In Hell they would be sure to know, because their murderer would be there....

"Ting...."

What was that faint approaching sound, drawing nearer and nearer through the darkness, that banished the haunting, dreadful images that crowded in her brain? It loosed the iron band that was bound about her aching temples. It melted the icy armor that was riveted about her torn and sorrowful heart....

"Ting-ting!"

She turned her head to the quarter whence it came, and listened, breathing quickly. Again came the silvern tinkle.

"Ting-ting-ting! ..."

Now the sound of heavy approaching footsteps came with it, and Fear fell from her like a pall all snow-wet. She rose up among the rustling dead leaves, bent, laid her hand on the shoulder of the sleeper, and roused him cautiously. He awakened, and said through the fingers she laid in caution on his lips:

"Who is it?..." And then instantly remembered, and passionately kissed the warning hand.

"Ting-ting, ting-ting!..."

"Do you hear, Monsieur?" she panted.

She snatched away the hand. He rose to his knees and listened.... Dawn, creeping into the hovel, painted their hands and faces gray. White teeth flashed in the gray of his, as he said to her joyfully:

"It is a priest, with the Blessed Sacrament!"

No more was said. They took hands and went out of the hovel, and passed round and through the little flowery front yard into the littered street of Petit Plappeville.

At its upper end two black figures, encircled by the yellow halo of a lantern-flame, moved toward them. Their shadows were thrown sidewise upon the littered road and the whitewashed garden walls. The bell tinkled, telling of the coming of Him Who is the Light of the World. The wheezing of someone troubled with asthma accompanied the clumping of wooden-soled country shoes.

Presently came in sight an old woman in sabots, carrying an immense umbrella, and a huge and antique lantern with horn slides. The stout figure of an elderly priest followed her, covered with a biretta, wearing a wide black mantle, and walking at a slow and decent pace.

At intervals he tinkled the small hand bell he carried in his left hand. His right arm was folded over his breast. As Juliette sank down in the dry dust, her companion hesitated an instant, then knelt down beside the girl.

The priest stopped as he neared the kneeling pair, and blessed them in silence. His round face looked puckered and anxious. He said, as his glance took in the bareheaded young man and the slender young woman, and their environment of ruin and desolation:

"My children, are you the only living creatures remaining in this unhappy village?"

Juliette was praying. P. C. Breagh answered in a reverent whisper:

"Yes, my Father. The Prussian horsemen came, and the villagers left their houses.... There was a wounded soldier in the cottage of Madame Guyot. He feigned to be dead, and the Uhlans ran him through with one of their lances. He lies within there! May his soul rest in peace!"

The priest solemnly raised the Host, and blessed the house of death. Then he said to Carolan and Juliette:

"It will be best that you should follow me to the place where I am going. A person lies there in extremity, to whom I carry Our Lord. Your presence will be something of an additional protection, in case any of these foreign soldiers should offer insult to Him I bear."

He rang the bell, and moved on along the street that was cumbered with the wreckage of humble households. The old woman in sabots preceded him, assiduously lighting his path. And the boy and girl came after the priest, walking side by side decorously. But presently, when Juliette stumbled, Carolan took her hand.

"Ting!"

They might have been walking to the Sepulcher on that earliest Easter morning, when He Who wrought man in His Own Image broke asunder the bonds of Death. The air was sweet with a wonderful reviving fragrance. Their pulses throbbed calmly, their blood flowed through their veins smoothly as new milk. Presently the old woman who walked before them began in a monotone to recite the Rosary. They answered, murmuring the sacred words in unison, moving on as though in a dream.

Over the smoldering villages in the southeast the August moon was setting, hanging like a great ripe glowing fruit against a background of translucent silvery hue. A broad band of primrose-yellow banding the purple blackness in the East betokened daybreak. Above, there hung one star of blazing emerald.

When they turned out of Petit Plappeville into a lane that trended upward, they could see upon the right the long lines of Prussian watch fires twinkling like rubies out of a mist that covered the low-lying country like a shallow, milky sea. Upon the left rose the ivied stone wall of some orchard or chateau garden. Steps rose to an archway in which hung the fragments of a door that had been battered in.

"Ting!"

As the priest rang his bell a bareheaded man appeared in the doorway. He was very pale, his dress was disordered, and his eyes had a strained and anxious look. He bent the knee and crossed himself, then stood aside as the Curé mounted the doorsteps. His wild eyes questioned the faces of the strangers who followed the lantern-bearer. He seemed reassured by what he saw there, and said to the priest in a muffled tone, loud enough to be heard by his companions:

"Take care ... there is broken glass strewed everywhere about here. Do not put out the lantern; it will be safer walking with more than one light!"

Then he took up a heavy silver candlestick he had set down upon a sort of rustic flower stand. The candle wax had guttered all down one side, making what old women call a winding sheet. He glanced at this as he took it up, and then at Mère Catherine. Then he moved forward, taking her place as guide, and the glass of smashed wine bottles that covered the ground cracked and crackled under his own boots, and the Curé's wooden-soled shoes. The huge sabots of Mère Catherine made short work of the splinters. Following in her Brobdingnagian footsteps, Juliette's small feet took no hurt.

A long, low house rose up before them. Its rows of barred basement windows indicated an extensive cellarage. Many of the windows were broken, and some of the ground-floor shutters had been wrenched off. Shattered furniture was thrown about in confusion, shrubs and rose trees had been ruined, broken bottles were here, there, and everywhere. And as a slight sound of astonishment came from Juliette, the priest having mounted some red-brick steps and entered after his guide at an open hall door, the old woman, to whom silence was evidently a sore penance, glanced back at the young one and said to her in a whisper:

"This is the Château Malakoff. Perhaps you remember?... And all those broken bottles.... The soldiers drank the wine...."

Then she hung her old white-capped head, and hurried after the Father, finishing the last decade of the Rosary as she went. Juliette and Breagh would have waited in the square hall on which the front door opened, but from the landing immediately above the aster of the house looked back frowning, and imperatively beckoned them to ascend.

They went upstairs.

The door of the death chamber stood open. From within, came the murmuring sound of the priest's voice. Red-eyed servants knelt in prayer about the threshold. The master of the house was just within the door. His square black head and vigorous shoulders looked angry and wrathful. Old Catherine whispered to Juliette as she beckoned her to kneel beside her:

"It is his wife, Madame Bénoit.... They were only married a year!"

Then she clashed her great Rosary and joined in the prayers vigorously, while the thin crying of a baby in an adjoining chamber pierced the sudden, deep, profound silence that fell upon all present when the priest elevated the Host. A little later she broke down again, and hissed in Juliette's ear that Madame was dying, that the baby had been born too soon, because the mother had been frightened by the Prussians ... that M. le Curé would give the Holy Oils after administering the Viaticum. And then in a gray pool of quiet that ensued some moments later, a woman's voice cried out with astonishment and terror and anger in it:

"Mon mari!... Mon mari!... Au secours!... Les Prussiens——"

And the cry broke off short with a horrible suddenness; there was a momentary confusion, and then the priest came out, looking stern and sorrowful. He opened the door widely, beckoning in several of the women. And Juliette, rising to make way for him, saw the wavering flames of tapers burning on either side of a Crucifix on a white-draped table, and the figure of the house master, with a face of ashen grayness turned toward her, leaning over a white bed, clasping something even whiter in a desperate embrace. Only two great hair plaits that flowed over the bosom of the dead woman glittered like solid bands of burnished copper in the wavering candlelight. And Dawn crept in through the open window, with the scent of the crushed and trampled roses, and the smell of wine spilled and staling, and the uneasy twittering of frightened birds.

And then—they were picking their way over the broken glass-covered gravel walk, and the priest, released from the obligation of silence, was eagerly asking for more particulars of the death of my Cousin Boisset.

"For the villagers of Petit Plappeville are hiding in the quarry of Seulvent. They will not return until the Prussians have left the neighborhood; they have learned what they have to expect from these men when they are full of wine.... We will stop as we pass, and tell them what has happened.... Then you had better come back with me to my presbytery. The soldiers have not left us much, but there will be coffee and bread!"

"But for me," said Mère Catherine, clumping along stoutly, "there would not be even bread and coffee. But I have my hiding holes of which I tell nobody. And as Monsieur le Curé did not know, he could not say where they were!"

That was a pleasant meal in the little deal-shelved study that had somehow escaped when the presbytery was turned upside down. It stood next the church, a little ancient plain stone building with a square belfry tower and a spire covered in with blackened slating, and two recumbent effigies of the twelfth century, that were dear to the good Curé's heart. After déjeuner he explained that he was going to visit these treasured relics for the purpose of ascertaining whether they had suffered damage at the Germans' hands.

He carried a basket with him when he trotted away on his errand. P. C. Breagh, as he leaned by the open casement of the little ground-floor study, rather wondered why it should contain a corked bottle and a biggish loaf of bread.

Juliette had gone to help Catherine restore order in the kitchen. The young man's hand was in his trousers pocket as he wondered, staring after the stout retreating figure in its cassock of rusty black. Suddenly he uttered an exclamation, and pulled out the hand with something shining in it. The piece of gold given him by Juliette.

He put a hand on the sill, and was out at the window in time to see the priest unlock the heavy sunken door that led into the belfry tower, and vanish into the dusk of the sacred place. He followed, to find the Curé struggling with a heavy ladder that led up to a trap hole in the huge-beamed, plastered ceiling of the belfry—a ladder that was evidently seldom shifted from its cobwebbed place against the whitewashed wall.

"Couldn't I do that? I'm a good deal stronger than, you are.... Halloa!... Lucky I was there!"

P. C. Breagh had thoughtlessly spoken in English, and the priest, who had not seen him enter, had nearly dropped the ladder. He said quite reproachfully, as the young man caught and steadied the ponderous bit of timber:

"Why have you followed me? Is it that you wish to speak to me privately? If so, pray do not do so in your English, which is sufficiently like German to give me an unpleasant agitation of the nerves!"

P. C. Breagh explained, exhibiting the golden coin, that it had been given him by Mademoiselle to secure a Mass.

"But certainly she shall have a Mass. Though five francs will be more than sufficient. Retain the coin, Monsieur, until I can find the necessary francs of change. You see, we are poor in this neighborhood ... it is to be expected!" The good Curé smiled, and added: "As you see me, I am rich compared with many of my confrères—even richer than some of my superiors. Therefore, if you will describe to me the features of the priest who read the Office, it may be arranged with more propriety that he shall offer Mass." He added, seeing the young man hesitate: "Recall his features. Describe his person, if you can!" ...

P. C. Breagh recalled and described. When he had done, the Curé said, in a tone of quiet conviction:

"That priest will not need Mademoiselle's five francs! ... And he is not only my superior.... He ranks above the angels.... Monsieur has spoken face to face with a glorious Saint of God!"

Something like an electric shock tingled from the roots of P. C. Breagh's hair down his spine, and passed out by way of his heels into the worn flagstones. He tried to speak, but his palate and tongue were stiff. The priest went on:

"Upon earth he was the Curé of Ars. As a Catholic, Monsieur has learned of him. But that he foretold this War, possibly Monsieur does not know?... A year before his holy death.... Since it has happened ... this War that the holy Curé prophesied, he has revisited the earthly places where he prayed and labored and suffered.... He has succored the wounded.... He has appeared, just as he was when alive, to the dying, and cheered and consoled them so that they have departed in joy and peace.... In the world this will not be credited. It does not matter!... What matters is, that those who perhaps asked the Saint of Ars to intercede for them in their hour of desperate need have received proof that in heaven, where he now dwells, he is still what he would have wished to be: a worker on behalf of souls.... He said this to me, twelve years ago, with that smile that the good God had given him, to make poor doubters sure that He Himself will one day smile on them in heaven——"

He stopped and wiped his face with a handkerchief that was unaffectedly a blue duster, and, noticing the sweat that had started on the other's face, interrupted himself to cry:

"But Monsieur is still holding that heavy ladder!... How could I be so forgetful!... No! it is not to be replaced against the wall. It is to be attached by the rings in the uprights to those hooks at the edge of that trap-door.... Since Monsieur has been favored with a vision of the Saint of Ars, he is worthy of all trust and confidence. Let Monsieur but fix the ladder while I turn the key in the door, and then he shall see a pigeon that I keep in the belfry tower!"

And the good man bustled to the door and locked it, and then came back to test the steadiness of the ladder, and mounted with asthmatic wheezings and much display of darned socks and venerable carpet slippers, and tapped three times at the trapdoor.

It was lifted at the signal, and P. C. Breagh beheld the gaunt and sunburnt face of a French Cuirassier, peering down out of the gloom of the spire that was faintly lighted by delicate lines of morning sunshine, gilding the upper edges of the shingle boards that roofed it in.

"Thanks, thanks, my Father!" the Cuirassier muttered, as the bottle of coffee and the loaf were handed up into his eager, shaking hands.

"Did you sleep?" the priest asked him, and the soldier answered in the affirmative, adding that he had been awakened by footsteps in the church below him at the earliest break of day.

Said the Curé:

"My child, it was I. A member of my parish was dying—I came to the church to take the Blessed Sacrament from the Tabernacle.... I forgot that you would probably awaken and suppose that your presence here had been betrayed!... But all is well! and a cart of brushwood will stop before the presbytery this evening and carry more than its load when it is driven on. It is going to a farm near Audun—from there you will be able to escape into Luxembourg, and from thence rejoin the Army when your wounds are sufficiently healed. It is said that the Army of Châlons, with the Duke of Magenta and the Emperor, now marches north from Rheims toward Sedan." He added as white teeth flashed in the dark face, and the sullen eyes gleamed scornfully: "You will please yourself as to serving again! You have already suffered greatly for our country!"

The soldier said roughly:

"I would die for her with a good heart!... But I will not fight again for this Emperor and his Marshal, by whom France has been sold and betrayed!"

"Well, well!... Au revoir, my child, and may Our Lord protect you," said the priest, sighing and beginning a puffing retreat down the ladder. "Shut the trapdoor down carefully, keep perfect silence, and remember that it is very dangerous to smoke. The curls of vapor can be seen rising between the shingles. I observed it when we had workmen here in Spring!"

Then he descended, and with P. C. Breagh's aid put back the ladder, unlocked the belfry tower door, and they went out into the clear bright autumn air.

"That soldier came last night," the Curé whispered, as they stopped to lock the door with the heavy iron key that was corroded with rust where use did not maintain its brightness. "He was taken prisoner in yesterday's battle, found to be wounded, disarmed, and left to shift for himself, with others in the same condition. One of them—in whose company this man was—had concealed a pistol, and had the daring to attempt the life of M. de Bismarck—or General Moltke—I am not sure which! But the shot missed its mark, and instantly all those who had seen it fired, with others who knew nothing, were massacred in cold blood. This man by a miracle—escaped!... How, I know not! He says he fell into a pit full of dead, and lay there expecting to be buried with them, until the darkness came to cover his resurrection from the grave."

They went back into the presbytery. The priest went to look for the fifteen francs of change out of Juliette's gold piece. She came out of the kitchen, from which Catherine's bedroom opened, and showed herself freshly laved, and attired in spotless neatness, her face no longer swollen with weeping and weariness, her superb hair brushed to dull cloudy silkiness, and newly coiled upon the summit of her little queenly head.

Her eyes shone brilliant and hard as blue jewels, as she said to her friend in a low, vibrating tone of excitement:

"Mère Catherine says that yesterday a French prisoner tried to shoot M. de Bismarck, and nearly succeeded.... See you well, I would like to meet that man!"

"Why, Mademoiselle?"

"To kiss the hand of one so brave, Monsieur!"

He regarded her in silence. She went on almost with hardihood, throwing back her head, and looking at him with eyes that gleamed between their narrowed lids.

"See you well—if I were only beautiful, I would give my beauty to the man who saved France!"

Her hearer's heart began to pound violently, and a dimness like mist came before his sight. Through it he was aware of long eyes that gleamed like wonderful azure jewels, and a small red mouth that pleaded for the soul of P. C. Breagh.... He saw that the underlip was like the bud of a pomegranate, and that the curve of the upper disclosed teeth as white as curd.... Then he heard the silver voice say with a sigh in it:

"But I am not beautiful ... not even pretty. Ah, Monsieur, if I but were!..."

She was hating herself as she saw his look respond to hers. As the amber sparks in his gray eyes leaped into fire and his under jaw thrust out savagely, she thought:

"There is something of my mother in me—more than a little! How dared I scorn her—I, who can speak and look like this?" And she repeated with a plaintive, lingering inflection: "If I were ... if I but were!"

For the primal Eve is in all women, believe me. When the first Woman bowed herself in her apron of leaves to strike out between the lump of iron ore and the flint flake, the spark that, blown within its nest of dried moss, begat Fire, she laughed and then wept; for she remembered how she had learned of old from the Serpent, wise Teacher of guile and evil! to kindle the hot spark of Desire in the hearts of men.

This knowledge would have come to Juliette as a legacy from Eve, her earliest ancestress, even had she not been born of Adelaide.

Meanwhile Breagh saw nothing but the little red mouth with the subtly wooing smile on it ... the gleaming jewels that were shadowed by their covert of black lashes.... Her will bent heavily on his, weakened by his worship of her. In another instant he would have asked what she wanted him to do.

But the heavy footsteps of the priest, clumping on the little crazy stair, recalled Breagh from the rapids toward which he had been drifting. In another moment the Curé came into the room. He had a knotted blue handkerchief in his hand, which weighed somewhat heavily. He said with a good-humored smile as he untied one of the knots, and took out a little pile of silver:

"Here behold my savings bank! Your fifteen francs, Mademoiselle!"

He was earnest to count them out and return them to her, and she was as earnest that the coins should not be given back.... But she could not deny her poverty when the good man charged her with it, saying:

"Accept the return of this money as a mortification salutary for the health of your soul!"

Then he tied up the handkerchief and stuffed it away under his cassock, and asked them:

"Where are you journeying together, my children? I have a reason for wishing to know!"

He had turned to P. C. Breagh, still thrilling with the memory of that strange look Juliette had cast upon him. The young man answered, glowing through his sunbrown:

"Wherever Mademoiselle de Bayard is desirous to go!"

The Curé pursed his mouth and turned to Juliette; and then sabots clumped in the passage, and a cracked voice cried from the door:

"'Mademoiselle' and 'Mademoiselle,' when she is no more 'Mademoiselle' than I am! ... Why not 'Madame'? ... Call things and folks by their right names!"

There was a terrible pause. Juliette was enduring agonies. The Curé pursed his mouth, and rounded his mild eyes behind their iron-rimmed spectacles. Mère Catherine went on triumphantly:

"It was her father's dearest wish that she should marry his old friend's only son. She told me that when we were washing up the coffee bowls, out in the kitchen there.... When the Prussians came to France, she went to Belgium with the young man's mother. 'To celebrate my marriage,' she told me, 'because M. What's-his-name was there!'"

P. C. Breagh had a sensation as of a weight of cold lead in the stomach. His feet seemed shod with lead, his arms hung down inertly. His tongue might have been turned to lead, so impossible was utterance. "Married!..." kept on ticking inside his head. "Married!..." and with maddening iteration, slowly as the clapper of a tolling bell. "You knew it ... She knew it ... Married all the time!"

His dull stare was set upon the face that had smiled on him so wooingly. It was snow-white now, and the eyes were hidden beneath their heavy fringes of black. The eyebrows were knitted, the pale lips set rigidly. The Curé looked at them a moment, and then asked, plump and plain:

"You are really married? My good Mère Catherine is not deceiving herself?"

Juliette shut down her stern upper lip upon its little neighbor, and raised clear, sorrowful eyes.

"As she says, I went to Belgium to celebrate my marriage. Now that I have returned, I shall await my husband here in France. My father esteemed him highly. He is M. Charles Tessier. He lives in the Rue de Provence, in the town of Versailles."

Whether the good Curé scented the quibble, we are not at all inclined to ask. We are concerned with P. C. Breagh, whose enchanted castle had crashed into dust and brickbats. One glance at his face, sharp as a wedge of cheese, and bleached under its wholesome freckles and sun-tan, told his Infanta what ruin she had wrought. But if he had seized and shaken her and cried: "You lie!" she would have lied again, defiantly. Was she not married, when her Colonel had believed so.... She would be, from now, in thought and word, the wife of Charles Tessier. Ah, Heaven!... The thought was more unwelcome than ever it had been.

Ah, Heaven! if that dear dead father could but have known this brave young Englishman. Would he have been in such haste to break his daughter's heart?... And—ah, Heaven!—again, if this burning of her boats meant parting, how could one live without one's comrade now?

He was so simple, and Juliette adored simplicity. He was so straightforward and honest, one could not guard the heart. When he had thought her dead, how piteously he had cried to her, "Juliette! Juliette!..." When she had crept from under the bed the lance had plunged through, barely missing her, and Breagh had dived at her and caught her up and hugged her, despite her terror and misery, she had known a wonderful thrill....

"Mine!" those fierce young arms conveyed, as they had strained her to his broad breast. Was it wicked, was it unnatural in one so newly bereaved of the noblest and dearest of all fathers, to have been taken by storm in those moments of desolation—to have dreamed since then of the rapture of being able to answer: "Yes, yes!... If our very own!... Never anyone's but yours...."?

Alas! if Juliette had been unnatural in yielding to such thoughts, was she not now punished? She had dealt with her own slight arm the blow that had shattered the fabric of her dreams as well as his.... She would never again see that light in the eyes of Monica's brother; never—against all the accepted traditions ruling the pre-matrimonial affairs of a young French girl of good family—be hugged in that rude, possessive, British way. But what loneliness, what terror, what danger had driven her into the arms that enfolded.... Besides, she would atone by marrying Charles Tessier. A tepid future passed by the side of the young cloth manufacturer extended before her.... She could not restrain a shudder at the thought, even while she mentally renewed her vow that, for the sake of him who had planned it, she would embrace such a future with resignation.... It flashed upon her now, with blinding clearness, that not only must the future be embraced, but the man....

"Tear the picture.... Forget the dream!" The words; of de Bayard's letter came back to her.

Ah, well!—she had done with pictures and dreams.... For her, realities. The comrade looked as though Reality had hit him smashingly. She barely recognized his cheerful voice as he answered to some leading question put by the Curé:

"I am ready and willing to act as escort to Madame. It would be risky for her to attempt to return alone to Versailles."

She tried to meet his sorrowful gray eyes and succeeded. She bent her little head and said with an admirable assumption of newly wedded dignity:

"Monsieur Breagh is very amiable. I will accept his offer with gratitude. When my husband learns of his great goodness, he too will thank him. Alas! at this moment my poor Charles is far away!..."

She sought for a tear, and found more than she had expected. For a whole thunderstorm of big, bright drops burst from those wonderful eyes.

She fell into a Windsor armchair polished by the worthy Curé's stout person, and dropped her arms upon the table, and her head on them, and sobbed, sobbed, sobbed.... The priest beckoned Breagh from the study. They were going to make arrangements for the journey. Horrible Mère Catherine, cause of all the misery, came and cackled over the prone, abandoned head.... Madame was going to start early to-morrow morning.... Allowing for the disorganization of the railway service, Madame would reach Versailles by noon of the same day. The husband of Madame would presently arrive to find her waiting for him. Heaven would shed blessings on their joyous reunion. Let Madame take her occasion of soliciting the patronage of St. Christopher, patron of all travelers. The first little male cherub that should bless the union of Madame and Monsieur would naturally be christened by the name of the good Saint.

LX

They drove in a country cart to Etain over roads bestrewn for the most part with the débris of the falling Empire, and there caught a train starting for Verdun. It was crammed with wounded French soldiers lying on straw in trucks and horse boxes. Women jostled one another at the doors of these, to supply the poor sufferers with soup and fruit, bread and coffee. The news of the retirement of Bazaine upon Metz was in every mouth, although, thanks to the cutting by Uhlans of the telegraph line between Metz and Thionville, the Emperor did not receive the Marshal's wire until the 22nd.

The Warlock had lost no time. Already the blockade of the doomed fortress city was so far completed that only the most daring French scouts were able to worm their way through the enemy's investing lines.

For, even as the octopus, desirous of increasing his family, throws off a spare tentacle which becomes another octopus, from the First and Second Armies of United Germany had been evolved a Fourth Army of Six Corps under the command of the Crown Prince of Saxony, whose Advance of Guard Cavalry were already over the Meuse.

The Army of the Prussian Crown Prince had traversed the roads south of Toul and entered the basin of the Ornain. The King of Prussia, with Bismarck and Moltke, had started to march on Paris through the dusty white plains of Champagne.

His Great Headquarters had already reached Bar-le-Duc. One of his scouting squadrons of Uhlans had captured a French courier at Commercy. Thus Moltke had learned that the mounted regiments of Canrobert's Corps had been left behind at the Camp of Châlons, and that Paris was being placed in a state of defense to resist an investment expected hourly.

On this very day the vast Camp had been abandoned, the Imperial pavilions, the mess houses, officers' quarters and kitchens were blazing merrily, the lines of rustic baraques usually occupied by the troops were marked out by crackling hedges of fire. While MacMahon, at his camp near Rheims, was torn between Ministerial orders emanating from the Empress, insisting on the immediate relief of Bazaine, and his own conviction that the order of march should be back by the directest route to defend the menaced capital.

Said the Man of Iron to Roon, whiffing a huge cigar as the steady downpour of rain swirled down the gutters and drenched the Bodyguard on duty outside the King's Headquarters at Bar-le-Duc:

"We barricade the straight road that leads to Metz. Will the fellow face the risks of a circuitous march leading him near the Belgian frontier? I should be personally obliged to him to decide quickly.... One does not desire to linger in a Capua as dismal as this."

Bismarck-Böhlen brought him a telegram. He was about to open it when the Warlock hastily entered the sitting room that served as ante-chamber, flourishing a copy of Le Temps, issued in Paris on the previous day.

"A Uhlan of the Advance has got me this paper. He took it from the person of a respectable bourgeois at whose house in Cligny he and his comrades called to drink a drop of wine. Judging it a welcome gift to me, the brave fellow rode here to bring it."

"There is wine of another kind on those pages," said the Minister, pointing to the journal with a smile.

Moltke read from the blood-stained paper:

"'The speeches delivered yesterday at the Chamber are unanimous in the declaration that the French people will be disgraced forever if the Army of the Rhine be not relieved. The dispatches received during the sitting of yesterday's Privy Council, from the Prefecture of Police, the Ministry of War and of the Interior, were of a nature to cause apprehension of the keenest. But the disposition of the people of Paris can be ascertained by any person whose ears are not stuffed with Court cotton-wool. Do not these shouts of "Dethronement!"—these cries of "A Republic! A Republic!" become louder every day?'"

He added:

"This bears out the text of Palikao's intercepted wire of yesterday to the Emperor; and the second from the Empress, virtually saying: 'Abandon Bazaine and Paris is in revolt!'..."

Commented the Minister:

"The Empress-Regent talks like a young woman. Palikao argues like an old one—the speakers in the Chamber gabble like a pack of old gossips, not one of whom looks beyond the end of her own nose. Paris was in revolution at the beginning of August. She will be a full-blown Republic before Christmas, whether Bazaine be abandoned or not."

Moltke said, helping himself from his silver snuffbox:

"MacMahon has not the courage to resist a consensus of quackers. He will march east and uncover the Paris road. I may say I had already drawn out private tables of marches which would thwart him in any case. What have you there? A wire in Secret Code?"

Bismarck answered:

"It is in Russian, with which language the sender knows me to be acquainted. He is an agent of our Secret Service, who combines the trade of wool stapler with the profession of notary, and holds the post of Sub-Prefect in the town of Rethel. He communicates by private wire that the Emperor has telegraphed the Prince Imperial that the junction with Bazaine will not be attempted, and that the march of the Army of Châlons will be directed upon Sedan. He states that when he quitted Rheims to-day the Imperial Headquarters had left for Tourteron...."

"Ei, ei! Is he trustworthy?" asked the Warlock, putting away the silver box.

The Minister answered succinctly:

"The intelligence he supplies is usually worth the money he is paid for it."

He went on:

"He has got into touch with the Roumanian Straz, who has not received cash for some dirty work he did in July at Sigmaringen, and who judges it advisable—Napoleon Bonaparte Grammont & Co. being insolvent—to transfer his services to the opposite firm.... He adds that Straz possesses, or says that he possesses, free access to the Prince Imperial. He appears to think our interests would be served by kidnapping the boy."

"Would they?" asked Moltke.

The Minister raised his shaggy brows, and answered smilingly:

"You are acquainted with the Countess's views in connection with the youngest Bonaparte. If the Queen does not want him to hand her tea and comb her lap dog, why should I not take M. Lulu home as a present to my wife?"

"You are jesting!" said the Warlock, shaking the wise old head in the scratch wig. "You have told this stinking rogue that decent German men make not war upon women or children.... When the time comes that we are guilty of such things, United Germany will be near her fall."

"Her barometer predicts a rise," said the Minister dryly, "at this particular moment."

"With God's help, we shall fulfill the prediction!" returned the Warlock, going to a table where lay spread a map on a comprehensive scale of an inch to a mile. "We will talk over this with the King, when the Crown Prince and Von Blumenthal come over from Ligny. It will be wiser to delay the movement on Paris, and hit this weather cock of a Marshal with all our forces. So, he marches his Army on the Meuse! So'o!..."

And he hummed a bar of the little song about the weeping flowers and the shining starlets, as he set the mental machinery in motion that resulted in the Grand Right Wheel.

LXI

The closed shutters of the Tessier house in the Rue de Provence gave that pleasant, airy, well-kept residence standing behind its high garden walls of stone-faced brick, festooned with autumn-tinted creepers, an unoccupied and cheerless air.

Repeated rings at the bell of the white-painted gate of wrought iron upon the right of the heavy porte cochère topped by the lozenged archway, elicited a caretaker in the person of the wife of the gardener-coachman, who cried out joyfully upon recognizing one of the ringers, and broke into a spate of words:

"Mademoiselle! ... Madame Charles! A thousand pardons for the error! But a return so unexpected. Nothing is ready...." She queried, her eyes becoming circular as they drank in the fact that the newly-married wife of her master had arrived in company of a strange young gentleman in a shabby brown suit of foreign make, and a straw hat decidedly the worse for wear: "Madame Tessier has not accompanied you?... Or Monsieur Charles?... Nothing has happened?" Upon being assured that her employers were well, and still in Belgium, she raised her eyes piously, and heaved a sigh of relief. "In these days such terrible things happen!" sighed the gardener-coachman's wife. "No one knows who the Prussians will not kill next!... Though, what with the soldiers that have gone away—regiments and regiments marching with their bands!—and the guns—thousands of guns rolling and rolling!—one would say that France possessed enough men.... But who knows! One can feel the fears of the people like a dark cloud blackening the sky.... They say that at Meudon the trees have been cut down and trenches dug, and beautiful villas blown up with gunpowder that the Germans may not live in them when they come. Of what use, then, the great cannon that break the windows when they fire them from the Forts of Issy and Meudon, Vanvres and Mont Valérien, if they cannot keep such people back?"

She had looked at the young man who accompanied Madame Charles as she put her question. He answered, with appreciation of the shrewdness prompting the question:

"One wishes one could answer that! But it is all true about the trenches and so on.... All the main roads leading north and west and east from Paris have been cut up in the same way. And the bridges have been mined—but they will not blow them up yet. They will wait until the Prussians come!"

"Grand Dieu! And all our hospitals here are full of wounded soldiers. They arrive in trains or wagons every hour.... People wait at the railway stations and at the barriers in crowds to see them. Sometimes one cries out: 'My brother!' or 'My husband!'—or 'My son!'..."

The wide mouth of the little woman widened in a grimace of misery. She gulped and sniffed, and the tears began to tumble from her beady black eyes. "My brother Michel has been killed!... My sister has received an official letter that says so. Also my husband's nephew, Jean Jacques—the dear youth who served Madame Tessier so faithfully.... Madame Charles must remember him going about the house in his striped jacket, cleaning the silver and sweeping and polishing the parquet.... And now my poor Potier, whom Madame Charles cannot have forgotten.... At fifty years of age, he has been called to serve again!"

Her poor Potier was even then marching with MacMahon's hundred thousand toward Montmedy by Mézières, and the end that was to meet him there, as the little woman dried her eyes with her blue apron, and bestirred herself to welcome one whom she firmly believed to be her young master's wife.

"No luggage! Madame has returned without luggage!" she commented mentally, as the driver of the hack vehicle that had brought Madame and her companion from the station was paid and jingled away.

Then as she shut the outer gate and locked it she realized that the companion of Madame Charles was a foreigner. She could hear the pair conversing in an unknown jargon as they stood together near the terrace steps. Upon which the perplexity of honest Madame Potier was banished by an effort of simple reasoning. The strange young man would be a Belgian—an employee of M. Charles. M. Charles had determined, all the world knew, to engage a resident bookkeeper. This must be the Belgian bookkeeper who had accompanied Madame. For his manner was humble to dejectedness, as became a dependent, and he looked at Madame with extreme wistfulness. He was actually saying:

"This means good-bye, I suppose, doesn't it?..."

Juliette returned, with her heart wavering in her like a wind-blown taper flame:

"If you desire it, Monsieur, of course it is good-bye!"