ink that. Don't cry. If you cry I will shoot myself."

Marguerite looked up and saw his helplessness in his face. He had sought
her before, but only with reproaches. Now his resentment was broken.
Twice had the dwarfs mischief thrown Marguerite on his compassion, and
thereby diminished his resistance to her. Jonas Bronck's hand, in its
red-hot seclusion behind the log, writhed and smoked, discharging its
grosser parts up the chimney's shaft. Unseen, it lay a wire-like outline
of bone; unseen, it became a hand of fairy ashes, trembling in every
filmy atom; finally an ember fell upon it, and where a hand had been
some bits of lime lay in a white glow.

Klussman went out and mounted one of the bastions, where the gunners
were already preparing for work. The weather had changed in the night,
and the sky seemed immeasurably lifted while yet filled with the
uncertainties of dawn. Fundy Bay revealed more and more of its clean
blue-emerald level, and far eastward the glassy water shaded up to a
flushing of pink. Smoke rose from the mess fires in D'Aulnay's camp. The
first light puff of burnt powder sprung from his batteries, and the
artillery duel again began.

"If we had but enough soldiers to make a sally," said Madame La Tour to
her officer, as she also came for an instant to the bastion, "we might
take his batteries. Oh, for monsieur to appear on the bay with a stout
shipload of men."

"It is time he came," said the Swiss.

"Yes, we shall see him or have news of him soon."

In the tumult of Klussman's mind Jonas Bronck's hand never again came
uppermost. He cared nothing and thought nothing about that weird
fragment, in the midst of living disaster. It had merely been the
occasion of his surrendering to Marguerite. He determined that when La
Tour returned and the siege was raised, if he survived he would take his
wife and go to some new colony. Live without her he could not. Yet
neither could he reespouse her in Fort St. John, where he had himself
openly denounced her.

Spring that day leaped forward to a semblance of June. The sun poured
warmth; the very air renewed life. But to Klussman it was the brilliancy
of passing delirium. He did not feel when gun-metal touched his hands.
The sound of the incoming tide, which could be heard betwixt artillery
boomings, and the hint of birds which that sky gave, were mute against
his thoughts.

Though D'Aulnay's loss was visibly heavy, it proved also an ill day for
the fort.