The Strangers halted with the rest, and John, coming out of the red rage that had possessed his soul, saw that Captain Colton was uninjured and that Carstairs and Wharton, who stood near him, had only scratches.

“Grazed four times,” said Carstairs happily.  “The bullets knew a good man when they saw him, and turned aside just in time to give him slight but honorable wounds.”

“Two scratches for me, too,” said Wharton.

“Which proves what I told you,” said Carstairs, “that it was often luck, not skill, that saved you.”

“Both count,” said Captain Colton, tersely.  “Napoleon had immense skill.  Suppose bad luck had sent a bullet into his heart in his first battle in Italy.  Would have been forgotten in a day.  And if no bullet had ever touched him, wouldn’t have amounted to much, without immense skill.”

“Do we go back to Chastel, sir?” asked John.

“Back to what’s left of it.  Not much, I think.  See nothing but Gothic tower!”

John looked up.  The great Gothic spire hung over a scene of desolation and ruin, now complete save for the cathedral itself.  Otherwise not an undamaged house remained in Chastel.  Fires still smoldered, and the largest of them all, marked where the Hotel de l’Europe had stood.  The firing had ceased save for a distant murmur where the cavalry still pursued, and John choked as he gazed at ruined Chastel.  He looked most often at the burning Hotel de l’Europe where he had spent such happy hours, the happiest, in truth, of his life, hours that glowed.  He could see as vividly, as if it were all real again, Julie and himself at the little table by the window, and Antoine and Suzanne serving.  He choked, and for a little while he could not reply to Wharton’s question: 

“Why, Scott, what’s struck you?  You look as if you had lost your last friend!”

“Wharton,” replied John at last, “I found Mademoiselle Lannes and her servants, Antoine and Suzanne Picard here, come as requested by letter, to meet her brother Philip.  I found them in the cathedral waiting, and we went to the Hotel de l’Europe, where she and I dined together.”

“Good Heavens!  You don’t mean to say she was there under the awful fire of our guns?”

“No, else I should not have been with you.  Weber, the trusty Alsatian, of whom you know, came to us in the town.  It was he who had borne the letter from Philip to Mademoiselle Julie.  We thought we saw Germans in the outskirts of Chastel.  We did not find any, but when we came back to the Hotel de l’Europe, where we left them, Mademoiselle Julie and her servants, the Picards, were gone.”

“Perhaps they were alarmed by the German advance and have taken refuge somewhere in the woods.  If so, it will be easy to find them, Scott.”

“No, they’re not there.  They’re in the hands of the enemy.  I shouldn’t mind it so much if she were merely a captive of the Germans, but that man Auersperg has taken her again.”