ld him there was nothing to
alarm him, nothing to make them despair. Sin could not touch
them; death was God's own gift.

He listened, too happy to even try to understand. Perhaps he
could not, being only a young man in love. But he knew that all
she said must be true, perhaps too true for him to comprehend. He
was satisfied; his life was complete. Something of the contentment
of a school-boy exhausted with play lingered in his eyes.

They had spoken of the box; she had taken it reverently in her
hands and touched the broken key, snapped off short in the lock.
Inside, the Prussian bullet rattled as she turned the box over
and over, her eyes dim with love for the man who had done all for
her.

Jack found a loaf of bread in the knapsack. It was hard and dry,
but they soaked it in the leaf-covered spring and ate it
deliciously, cheek against cheek.

Little by little their plans took shape. They were to go--Heaven
knows how!--to find the Emperor. Into his hands they would give
the box with its secrets, then turn again, always together, ready
for their work, wherever it might be.

Towards mid-afternoon Lorraine grew drowsy. There was a summer
warmth in the air; the little forest birds came to the spring
and preened their feathers in the pale sunshine. Two cicadas,
high in the tree-tops, droned an endless harmony; hemlock cones
dropped at intervals on the dead leaves.

When Lorraine lay asleep, her curly head on Jack's folded coat,
her hands clasped under her cheek, Jack leaned back against the
tree and picked up the box. He turned it softly, so that the
bullet within should not rattle. After a moment he opened his
penknife and touched the broken fragment of the key in the lock.
Idly turning the knife-blade this way and that, but noiselessly,
for fear of troubling Lorraine, he thought of the past, the
present, and the future. Sir Thorald lay dead on the hillock
above the river Lisse; Alixe slept beside him; Rickerl was
somewhere in the country, riding with his Uhlan scourges; Molly
Hesketh waited in Paris for her dead husband; the Marquis de
Nesville's bones were lying in the forest where he now sat,
watching the sleeping child of the dead man. His child? Jack
looked at her tenderly. No, not the child of the Marquis de
Nesville, but a foundling, a lost waif in the Lorraine Hills,
perhaps a child of chance. What of it? She would never know. The
Chateau de Nesville was a smouldering mass of fire; the lands
could reve