Don Marcelo did not need to ask anything further; he dreaded to know the truth.  Nevertheless, he asked after her husband.  Now that he was awake and free, he cherished the fleeting hope that what he had gone through the night before was but another of his nightmares.  Perhaps the poor man was still living. . . .

“They killed him, Monsieur.  That man who seemed so good murdered him. . . .  And I don’t know where his body is; nobody will tell me.”

She had a suspicion that the corpse was in the fosse.  The green and tranquil waters had closed mysteriously over this victim of the night. . . .  Desnoyers suspected that another sorrow was troubling the mother still more, but he kept modestly silent.  It was she who finally spoke, between outbursts of grief. . . .  Georgette was now in the lodge.  Horror-stricken and shuddering, she had fled there when the invaders had left the castle.  They had kept her in their power until the last minute.

“Oh, Master, don’t look at her. . . .  She is trembling and sobbing at the thought that you may speak with her about what she has gone through.  She is almost out of her mind.  She longs to die!  Ay, my little girl! . . .  And is there no one who will punish these monsters?”

They had come up from the cellars and crossed the bridge, the woman looking fixedly into the silent waters.  The dead body of a swan was floating upon them.  Before their departure, while their horses were being saddled, two officers had amused themselves by chasing with revolver shots the birds swimming in the moat.  The aquatic plants were spotted with blood; among the leaves were floating some tufts of limp white plumage like a bit of washing escaped from the hands of a laundress.

Don Marcelo and the woman exchanged a compassionate glance, and then looked pityingly at each other as the sunlight brought out more strongly their aging, wan appearance.

The passing of these people had destroyed everything.  There was no food left in the castle except some crusts of dry bread forgotten in the kitchen.  “And we have to live, Monsieur!” exclaimed the woman with reviving energy as she thought of her daughter’s need.  “We have to live, if only to see how God punishes them!” The old man shrugged his shoulders in despair; God? . . .  But the woman was right; they had to live.

With the famished audacity of his early youth, when he was travelling over boundless tracts of land, driving his herds of cattle, he now rushed outside the park, hunting for some form of sustenance.  He saw the valley, fair and green, basking in the sun; the groups of trees, the plots of yellowish soil with the hard spikes of stubble; the hedges in which the birds were singing—­all the summer splendor of a countryside developed and cultivated during fifteen centuries by dozens and dozens of generations.  And yet—­here he was alone at the mercy of chance, likely to perish with hunger—­more alone than when he was crossing the towering heights of the Andes—­those irregular slopes of rocks and snow wrapped in endless silence, only broken from time to time by the flapping of the condor’s wings.  Nobody. . . .  His gaze could not distinguish a single movable point—­everything fixed, motionless, crystallized, as though contracted with fear before the peals of thunder which were still rumbling around the horizon.