And perhaps it is well that I should admit without concealment that I am not one of the women to whom it has been given to see those who came back.  There are moments when I will not deny I have asked myself why those others should have been so privileged and never I. Not even in a dream do I see those whom I have lost; yet I think that I too have loved them as well as any have been loved.  I have stood by their beds to the last; I have closed their beloved eyes. Mon Dieu! mon Dieu! have not I drunk of that cup to the dregs?  But never to me, never to me, has it been permitted either to see or to hear. Bien! it has been so ordered.  Agnes, my daughter-in-law, is a good woman.  I have not a word to say against her; and if there are moments when my heart rebels, when I ask myself why she should have her eyes opened and not I, the good God knows that I do not complain against His will—­it is in His hand to do as He pleases.  And if I receive no privileges, yet have I the privilege which is best, which is, as M. le Cure justly observes, the highest of all—­ that of doing my duty.  In this I thank the good Lord our Seigneur that my Martin has never needed to be ashamed of his mother.

I will also admit that when it was first made apparent to me—­not by the sounds of voices which the others heard, but by the use of my reason which I humbly believe is also a gift of God—­that the way in which I could best serve both those of the city and my son Martin, who is over them, was to lead the way with the children and all the helpless to La Clairiere, thus relieving the watchers, there was for a time a great struggle in my bosom.  What were they all to me, that I should desert my Martin, my only son, the child of my old age; he who is as his father, as dear, and yet more dear, because he is his father’s son?  ’What! (I said in my heart) abandon thee, my child? nay, rather abandon life and every consolation; for what is life to me but thee?’ But while my heart swelled with this cry, suddenly it became apparent to me how many there were holding up their hands helplessly to him, clinging to him so that he could not move.  To whom else could they turn?  He was the one among all who preserved his courage, who neither feared nor failed.  When those voices rang out from the walls—­which some understood, but which I did not understand, and many more with me—­though my heart was wrung with straining my ears to listen if there was not a voice for me too, yet at the same time this thought was working in my heart.  There was a poor woman close to me with little children clinging to her; neither did she know what those voices said.  Her eyes turned from Semur, all lost in the darkness, to the sky above us and to me beside her, all confused and bewildered; and the children clung to her, all in tears, crying with that wail which is endless—­the trouble of childhood which does not know why it is troubled.  ‘Maman!  Maman!’ they cried, ‘let us go home.’  ’Oh!