Bernadou smiled on her.  “I do not know, my dear.  I think even they can hardly bring death upon women and children.”

“They can, and they will,” said a voice from the crowd.

None answered.  The street was very quiet in the darkness.  Far away in the east the red glare glowed.  On the wind was still that faint, distant, ravening roar, like the roar of famished wolves; it was the roar of fire and of war.

In the silence Reine Allix spoke:  “God is good.  Shall we not trust in Him?”

With one great choking sob the people answered; their hearts were breaking.  All night long they watched in the street—­they who had done no more to bring this curse upon them than the flower-roots that slept beneath the snow.  They dared not go to their beds; they knew not when the enemy might be upon them.  They dared not flee; even in their own woods the foe might lurk for them.  One man indeed did cry aloud, “Shall we stay here in our houses to be smoked out like bees from their hives?  Let us fly!”

But the calm, firm voice of Reine Allix rebuked him:  “Let who will, run like a hare from the hounds.  For me and mine, we abide by our homestead.”

And they were ashamed to be outdone by a woman, and a woman of ninety years old, and no man spoke any more of flight.  All the night long they watched in the cold and the wind, the children shivering beneath their mothers’ skirts, the men sullenly watching the light of the flames in the dark, starless sky.  All night long they were left alone, though far off they heard the dropping shots of scattered firing, and in the leafless woods around them the swift flight of woodland beasts startled from their sleep, and the hurrying feet of sheep terrified from their folds in the outlying fields.

The daybreak came, gray, cheerless, very cold.  A dense fog, white and raw, hung over the river; in the east, where the sun, they knew, was rising, they could only see the livid light of the still towering flames and pillars of black smoke against the leaden clouds.

“We will let them come and go in peace if they will,” murmured old Mathurin.  “What can we do?  We have no arms, no powder hardly, no soldiers, no defence.”

Bernadou said nothing, but he straightened his tall limbs, and in his grave blue eyes a light gleamed.

Reine Allix looked at him as she sat in the doorway of her house.  “Thy hands are honest, thy heart pure, thy conscience clear.  Be not afraid to die if need there be,” she said to him.

He looked down and smiled on her.  Margot clung to him in a passion of weeping.  He clasped her close and kissed her softly, but the woman who read his heart was the woman who had held him at his birth.