“Oh, that will never do,” cried Rose, and they put him back in the cradle with all expedition, and began to rock it.  Young master was not to be altogether appeased even by that.  So Rose began singing an old-fashioned Breton chant or lullaby.

Josephine sang with her, and, singing, watched with a smile her boy drop off by degrees to sleep under the gentle motion and the lulling song.  They sang and rocked till the lids came creeping down, and hid the great blue eyes; but still they sang and rocked, lulling the boy, and gladdening their own hearts; for the quaint old Breton ditty was tunable as the lark that carols over the green wheat in April; and the words so simple and motherly, that a nation had taken them to heart.  Such songs bind ages together and make the lofty and the low akin by the great ties of music and the heart.  Many a Breton peasant’s bosom in the olden time had gushed over her sleeping boy as the young dame’s of Beaurepaire gushed now—­in this quaint, tuneful lullaby.

Now, as they kneeled over the cradle, one on each side, and rocked it, and sang that ancient chant, Josephine, who was opposite the screen, happening to raise her eyes, saw a strange thing.

There was the face of a man set close against the side of the screen, and peeping and peering out of the gloom.  The light of her candle fell full on this face; it glared at her, set pale, wonder-struck, and vivid in the surrounding gloom.

Horror!  It was her husband’s face.

At first she was quite stupefied, and looked at it with soul and senses benumbed.  Then she trembled, and put her hand to her eyes; for she thought it a phantom or a delusion of the mind.  No:  there it glared still.  Then she trembled violently, and held out her left hand, the fingers working convulsively, to Rose, who was still singing.

But, at the same moment, the mouth of this face suddenly opened in a long-drawn breath.  At this, Josephine uttered a violent shriek, and sprang to her feet, with her right hand quivering and pointing at that pale face set in the dark.

Rose started up, and, wheeling her head round, saw Raynal’s gloomy face looking over her shoulder.  She fell screaming upon her knees, and, almost out of her senses, began to pray wildly and piteously for mercy.

Josephine uttered one more cry, but this was the faint cry of nature, sinking under the shock of terror.  She swooned dead away, and fell senseless on the floor ere Raynal could debarrass himself of the screen, and get to her.

This, then, was the scene that met Edouard’s eyes.  His affianced bride on her knees, white as a ghost, trembling, and screaming, rather than crying, for mercy.  And Raynal standing over his wife, showing by the working of his iron features that he doubted whether she was worthy he should raise her.

One would have thought nothing could add to the terror of this scene.  Yet it was added to.  The baroness rang her bell violently in the room below.  She had heard Josephine’s scream and fall.