Reine Allix looked at him, and laid her hand on his bowed head, and her voice was strong and tender as music:  “Fret not thyself, my beloved.  When the moment comes, then do as thine own heart and the whisper of God in it bid thee.”

A great sob answered her; it was the first since his earliest infancy that she had ever heard from Bernadou.

It grew dark.  The autumn day died.  The sullen clouds dropped scattered rain.  The red leaves were blown in millions by the wind.  The little houses on either side the road were dark, for the dwellers in them dared not show any light that might be a star to allure to them the footsteps of their foes.  Bernadou sat with his arms on the table, and his head resting on them.  Margot nursed her son.  Reine Allix prayed.

Suddenly in the street without there was the sound of many feet of horses and of men, the shouting of angry voices, the splashing of quick steps in the watery ways, the screams of women, the flash of steel through the gloom.  Bernadou sprang to his feet, his face pale, his blue eyes dark as night.  “They are come!” he said, under his breath.  It was not fear that he felt, nor horror; it was rather a passion of love for his birthplace and his nation—­a passion of longing to struggle and to die for both.  And he had no weapon!

He drew his house-door open with a steady hand, and stood on his own threshold and faced these his enemies.  The street was full of them, some mounted, some on foot; crowds of them swarmed in the woods and on the roads.  They had settled on the village as vultures on a dead lamb’s body.  It was a little, lowly place; it might well have been left in peace.  It had had no more share in the war than a child still unborn, but it came in the victors’ way, and their mailed heel crushed it as they passed.  They had heard that arms were hidden and francs-tireurs sheltered there, and they had swooped down on it and held it hard and fast.  Some were told off to search the chapel; some to ransack the dwellings; some to seize such food and bring such cattle as there might be left; some to seek out the devious paths that crossed and recrossed the fields; and yet there remained in the little street hundreds of armed men, force enough to awe a citadel or storm a breach.

The people did not attempt to resist.  They stood passive, dry-eyed in misery, looking on while the little treasures of their household lives were swept away for ever, and ignorant what fate by fire or iron might be their portion ere the night was done.  They saw the corn that was their winter store to save their offspring from famine poured out like ditch-water.  They saw oats and wheat flung down to be trodden into a slough of mud and filth.  They saw the walnut presses in their kitchens broken open, and their old heirlooms of silver, centuries old, borne away as booty.  They saw the oak cupboards in their wives’ bed-chambers ransacked, and the homespun linen and