Croisette began to shake all over.  He clutched one of the pillars, which bore up the porch, and pressed his face against its cold surface, hiding his eyes from the sight.  The worst had come.  In our hearts I think we had always fancied some accident would save our friend, some stranger warn him.

“Oh, poor, poor Kit!” Croisette cried, bursting suddenly into violent sobs.  “Oh, Kit!  Kit!”

CHAPTER X.

Hau, Hau, Huguenots!

His late Majesty, Henry the Fourth, I remember—­than whom no braver man wore sword, who loved danger indeed for its own sake, and courted it as a mistress—­could never sleep on the night before an action.  I have heard him say himself that it was so before the fight at Arques.  Croisette partook of this nature too, being high-strung and apt to be easily over-wrought, but never until the necessity for exertion had passed away:  while Marie and I, though not a whit stouter at a pinch, were slower to feel and less easy to move—­more Germanic in fact.

I name this here partly lest it should be thought after what I have just told of Croisette that there was anything of the woman about him—­save the tenderness; and partly to show that we acted at this crisis each after his manner.  While Croisette turned pale and trembled, and hid his eyes, I stood dazed, looking from the desolate house to the face stiffening in the sunshine, and back again; wondering, though I had seen scores of dead faces since daybreak, and a plenitude of suffering in all dreadful shapes, how Providence could let this happen to us.  To us!  In his instincts man is as selfish as any animal that lives.

I saw nothing indeed of the dead face and dead house after the first convincing glance.  I saw instead with hot, hot eyes the old castle at home, the green fields about the brook, and the grey hills rising from them; and the terrace, and Kit coming to meet us, Kit with white face and parted lips and avid eyes that questioned us!  And we with no comfort to give her, no lover to bring back to her!

A faint noise behind as of a sign creaking in the wind, roused me from this most painful reverie.  I turned round, not quickly or in surprise or fear.  Rather in the same dull wonder.  The upper part of the bookseller’s door was ajar.  It was that I had heard opened.  An old woman was peering out at us.

As our eyes met, she made a slight movement to close the door again.  But I did not stir, and seeming to be reassured by a second glance, she nodded to me in a stealthy fashion.  I drew a step nearer, listlessly.  “Pst!  Pst!” she whispered.  Her wrinkled old face, which was like a Normandy apple long kept, was soft with pity as she looked at Croisette.  “Pst!”

“Well!” I said, mechanically.

“Is he taken?” she muttered.

“Who taken?” I asked stupidly.