wift movement the mother caught up a shawl that lay
beside the bed, and turned to the door.

Alas, too late. She had repented, but too late. With her hand on the
latch, her foot on the threshold, she stood, arrested by a low distant
cry that caught her ear, and swelled even as she listened to it, into a
roar of many voices rousing the town. What was it? Alas, she knew; she
knew, and cowered against the door whitefaced and shaking. A moment
passed, and the alarm, after sinking, rose again, and now there was no
doubt of its meaning. Shod feet pattered through the streets, windows
clattered up noisily; a wild medley of voices broke out, and again in a
few seconds was lost in the crashing sound of the very volley she had
foreheard!

From that moment it seemed to her that hell was broken loose in the
town; and she had loosed it! She could no longer, in the din that rose
from the street, distinguish one sound from another; but the crash of
distant cannon, the heavy tramp of feet near at hand, the screams and
cries and shouting, the blare of trumpets, all rose in a confused babel
of sounds that shook the very houses, and blanched the cheeks and drove
the blood to the heart. The woman, cowering against the door, covered
her ears, and groaned. Her horror at what she had done was so great,
that she did not heed what was passing near her, nor give a thought to
the child in the same room with her until the latter's voice struck her
ear, and she turned and found her daughter standing in the middle of the
floor, her hand to her breast, and her eyes wide. Then the mother awoke
in her again; with pallid shaking lips she cried to her to lie down--to
lie down, for there was no danger.

But the girl raised her hand for silence. "Hush!" she said. "I hear a
step! It is his! It is his! And he is coming to me! Mother, he is coming
to me!"

The mother imagined that terror had turned the girl's brain; it was
inconceivable that in that roar of sound a single step could make itself
heard, or be recognized. And she tried, in a voice that shook with
horror and remorse, to repeat her meaningless words of comfort. But
they died on her lips, died still-born, as the door flew open, and a man
rushed in, gazed an instant, then caught her child in his arms.

It was the Burgomaster's son!

The woman from the House on the Wall leaned an instant against the
door-post, gazing at them. Little by little as she looked the expression
in her eyes changed, a