The hope of escape to her own people did not animate her labor.  She had no hope of any sort.  She felt only present necessity, which was to climb where the Highland officer climbed.  He was in front of her, and took no notice of her until they reached a slippery wall where there were no bushes.  There he turned and caught her by the wrist, drawing her up after him.  Their faces came near together in the swimming vapors of dawn.  He had the bright look of determination.  His eyes shone.  He was about to burst into the man’s arena of glory.  The woman, whom he drew up because she was a woman, and because he regretted having taken her prisoner, had the pallid look of a victim.  Her tragic black eyes and brows, and the hairs clinging in untidy threads about her haggard cheeks instead of curling up with the damp as the Highlandman’s fleece inclined to do, worked an instant’s compassion in him.  But his business was not the squiring of angular Frenchwomen.  Shots were heard at the top of the rock, a trampling rush, and then exulting shouts.  The English had taken Vergor’s camp.

The hand was gone from Jeannette’s wrist,—­the hand which gave her such rapture and such pain by its firm fraternal grip.  Colonel Fraser leaped to the plain, and was in the midst of the skirmish.  Cannon spoke, like thunder rolling across one’s head.  A battery guarded by the sentinels they had passed was aroused, and must be silenced.  The whole face of the cliff suddenly bloomed with scarlet uniforms.  All the men remaining in the boats went up as fire sweeps when carried by the wind.  Nothing could restrain them.  They smelled gunpowder and heard the noise of victory, and would have stormed heaven at that instant.  They surrounded Jeannette without seeing her, every man looking up to the heights of glory, and passed her in fierce and panting emulation.

Jeannette leaned against the rough side of Wolfe’s Cove.  On the inner surface of her eyelids she could see again the image of the Highlandman stooping to help her, his muscular legs and neck showing like a young god’s in the early light.  There she lost him, for he forgot her.  The passion of women whom nature has made unfeminine, and who are too honest to stoop to arts, is one of the tragedies of the world.

Daylight broke reluctantly, with clouds mustering from the inverted deep of the sky.  A few drops of rain sprinkled the British uniforms as battalions were formed.  The battery which gave the first intimation of danger to the French general, on the other side of Quebec, had been taken and silenced.  Wolfe and his officers hurried up the high plateau and chose their ground.  Then the troops advanced, marching by files, Highland bagpipes screaming and droning, the earth reverberating with a measured tread.  As they moved toward Quebec they wheeled to form their line of battle, in ranks three deep, and stretched across the plain.  The city was scarcely a mile away, but a ridge of ground still hid it from sight.