“Why is her hand bloody?” said the grandmother at last.

Pierrette, overcome by the sleep which follows all abnormal displays of strength, and dimly conscious that she was safe from violence, gradually unbent her fingers.  Brigaut’s letter fell from them like an answer.

“They tried to take my letter from her,” said Brigaut, falling on his knees and picking up the lines in which he had told his little friend to come instantly and softly away from the house.  He kissed with pious love the martyr’s hand.

It was a sight that made those present tremble when they saw the old gray woman, a sublime spectre, standing beside her grandchild’s pillow.  Terror and vengeance wrote their fierce expressions in the wrinkles that lined her skin of yellow ivory; her forehead, half hidden by the straggling meshes of her gray hair, expressed a solemn anger.  She read, with a power of intuition given to the aged when near their grave, Pierrette’s whole life, on which her mind had dwelt throughout her journey.  She divined the illness of her darling, and knew that she was threatened with death.  Two big tears painfully rose in her wan gray eyes, from which her troubles had worn both lashes and eyebrows, two pearls of anguish, forming within them and giving them a dreadful brightness; then each tear swelled and rolled down the withered cheek, but did not wet it.

“They have killed her!” she said at last, clasping her hands.

She fell on her knees which struck sharp blows on the brick-laid floor, making a vow no doubt to Saint Anne d’Auray, the most powerful of the madonnas of Brittany.

“A doctor from Paris,” she said to Brigaut.  “Go and fetch one, Brigaut, go!”

She took him by the shoulder and gave him a despotic push to send him from the room.

“I was coming, my lad, when you wrote me; I am rich,—­here, take this,” she cried, recalling him, and unfastening as she spoke the strings that tied her short-gown.  Then she drew a paper from her bosom in which were forty-two bank-bills, saying, “Take what is necessary, and bring back the greatest doctor in Paris.”

“Keep those,” said Frappier; “he can’t change thousand franc notes now.  I have money, and the diligence will be passing presently; he can certainly find a place on it.  But before he goes we had better consult Doctor Martener; he will tell us the best physician in Paris.  The diligence won’t pass for over an hour,—­we have time enough.”

Brigaut woke up Monsieur Martener, and brought him at once.  The doctor was not a little surprised to find Mademoiselle Lorrain at Frappier’s.  Brigaut told him of the scene that had just taken place at the Rogrons’; but even so the doctor did not at first suspect the horror of it, nor the extent of the injury done.  Martener gave the address of the celebrated Horace Bianchon, and Brigaut started for Paris by the diligence.  Monsieur Martener then sat down and examined first the bruised and bloody hand which lay outside the bed.