“Lucien!  Lucien!  Look at me!”

It was a woman’s cry, shrill, sounding above the uproar.

Shaking with fear, yet perhaps with a glimmer of hope still in his heart, Bruslart looked.  There was a woman held high above the crowd, supported and steadied by strong men’s arms.

“I said you should see me laugh.  Look, Lucien!  I laugh at you.”

“It is a mistake.  Save me, Pauline, save me!”

“I laugh, Lucien,” and a shriek of laughter, mad, riotous, fiendish, cut like a sharp knife through all that yelling confusion.

With a cry of rage, despair, and terror, Bruslart sank trembling in a heap to the floor of the tumbril.  Latour did not move.  He had not turned to look at Pauline Vaison.  The thought of another woman was in his soul.  Was she safe?

There was a pause, the crowd was so dense at this corner; then the tumbril moved on again.  The corner was turned.  Straight before him looked Raymond Latour, over the multitude of heads, over the waving arms and red caps, straight before him across the Place de la Revolution to the guillotine, to the blue sky, sunlit, against which it rose—­and beyond.

EPILOGUE

HOME

A green hummock and the blue waters of Chesapeake Bay.  Sunlight over the grass, sunlight over the sea, touching white sails there.  A woman sat on the hummock, a man lay at her feet.

“Jeanne, you are sitting there almost exactly as I have often sat for hours when I was a youngster, with my chin in my hands, and my elbows on my knees.”

“Am I, dear?”

“Little wife, what are you thinking of?”

“Just my happiness and you.  When you used to sit here you never thought of me.”

“No, dear.”

“And yonder, all the time, I was waiting for you.”

“There came a time, Jeanne, when I believed this spot could never be dear to me again, when I thought it could never again be home.”

“And now, Richard?”

“Now, my darling, I am as a man who is almost too richly blessed.  In this world I have found paradise.”

“Of course that isn’t really true,” she answered, “but I like to hear you say it.”

“Jeanne dear, there is only one regret.  I wish my mother could be here to see you.”

“She knows, Richard, never doubt that,” Jeanne answered.  “When I think of you, I often think of her too.  I am here, in her place.  Her boy has become my husband.  I am very thankful to her for my good, brave husband.”

He rose to his knees, put his arm round her, and kissed her.

“You have no regret, Jeanne?”

“None.”

“No disappointment in me, in Broadmead, in this land of Virginia?”

“None.  But sometimes, Richard, when I see a sail, like that one yonder, fading into the horizon, going, it may be, toward France, I wonder what has become of some of those we knew.”