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Suddenly a voice arose from the armed mass: “Bring me the peasant hither.”

Bernadou was seized by several hands and forced and dragged from his door out to the place where the leader of the uhlans sat on a white charger that shook and snorted blood in its exhaustion. Bernadou cast off the alien grasp that held him, and stood erect before his foes. He was no longer pale, and his eyes were clear and steadfast.

“You look less a fool than the rest,” said the Prussian commander. “You know this country well?”

“Well!” The country in whose fields and woodlands he had wandered from his infancy, and whose every meadow-path and wayside tree and flower-sown brook he knew by heart as a lover knows the lines of his mistress’s face!

“You have arms here?” pursued the German.

“We had.”

“What have you done with them?”

“If I had had my way, you would not need ask. You would have felt them.”

The Prussian looked at him keenly, doing homage to the boldness of the answer. “Will you confess where they are?”

“No.”

“You know the penalty for concealment of arms is death?”

“You have made it so.”

“We have, and Prussian will is French law. You are a bold man; you merit death. But still, you know the country well?”

Bernadou smiled, as a mother might smile were any foolish enough to ask her if she remembered the look her dead child’s face had worn.

“If you know it well,” pursued the Prussian, “I will give you a chance. Lay hold of my stirrup-leather and be lashed to it, and show me straight as the crow flies to where the weapons are hidden. If you do, I will leave you your life. If you do not–“

“If I do not?”

“You will be shot.”

Bernadou was silent; his eyes glanced through the mass of soldiers to the little cottage under the trees opposite. The two there were straining to behold him, but the soldiers pushed them back, so that in the flare of the torches they could not see, nor in the tumult hear. He thanked God for it.

“Your choice?” asked the uhlan, impatiently, after a moment’s pause.

Bernadou’s lips were white, but they did not tremble as he answered, “I am no traitor.” And his eyes, as he spoke, went softly to the little porch where the light glowed from that hearth beside which he would never again sit with the creatures he loved around him.

The German looked at him. “Is that a boast, or a fact?”

“I am no traitor,” Bernadou answered, simply, once more.

The Prussian gave a sign to his troopers. There was the sharp report of a double shot, and Bernadou fell dead. One bullet had pierced his brain, the other was bedded in his lungs. The soldiers kicked aside the warm and quivering body. It was only a peasant killed!

With a shriek that rose above the roar of the wind, and cut like steel to every human heart that beat there, Reine Allix forced her way through the throng, and fell on her knees beside him, and caught him in her arms, and laid his head upon her breast, where he had used to sleep his softest sleep in infancy and childhood. “It is God’s will! it is God’s will!” she muttered; and then she laughed–a laugh so terrible that the blood of the boldest there ran cold.

Margot followed her and looked, and stood dry-eyed and silent; then flung herself and the child she carried in her arms beneath the hoof of the white charger. “End your work!” she shrieked to them. “You have killed him–kill us. Have you not mercy enough for that?”

The horse, terrified and snorting blood, plunged and trampled the ground; his fore foot struck the child’s golden head and stamped its face out of all human likeness. Some peasants pulled Margot from the lashing hoofs; she was quite dead, though neither wound nor bruise was on her.

Reine Allix neither looked nor paused. With all her strength she had begun to drag the body of Bernadou across the threshold of his house. “He shall lie at home, he shall lie at home,” she muttered. She would not believe that already he was dead. With all the force of her earliest womanhood she lifted him, and half drew, half bore him into the house that he had loved, and laid him down upon the hearth, and knelt by him, caressing him as though he were once more a child, and saying softly, “Hush!”–for her mind was gone, and she fancied that he only slept.