d. The preparations of the morning made the
completion of this task swift and easy. D'Aulnay de Charnisay intended
to hang her garrison when he set his name to the paper securing their
lives. The ringing of hammers sounded far off to Marie.

"I don't understand these things," she articulated. "I don't understand
anything in the world!"

D'Aulnay gave himself up to watching the process, in spite of Father
Vincent de Paris, whose steady remonstrances he answered only by shrugs.
In that age of religious slaughter the Capuchin could scarcely object to
decreasing heretics, but he did object as a man and a priest to such
barbarous treachery toward men with whom a compact had been made. The
refined nurture of France was not recent in D'Aulnay's experience, but
he came of a great and honorable house, and the friar's appeal was made
to inherited instincts.

"Good churchman," spoke out Jean le Prince, the lad, shaking his hair
back from his face, "your capote and sandals lie there by the door of
the tower, where Edelwald took thought to place them for you. But you
who have the soldier's heart should wear the soldier's dress, and hide
D'Aulnay de Charnisay under the cowl."

"You men-at-arms," Glaud Burge exhorted the guards drawn up, on each
side of him and his fellow-prisoners, "will you hang us up like dogs? If
we must die we claim the death of soldiers. You have your pieces in your
hands; shoot us. Do us such grace as we would do you in like extremity."

The guards looked aside at each other and then at their master, shamed
through their peasant blood by the outrage they were obliged to put upon
a courageous garrison. But Edelwald said nothing. His eyes were upon
Marie. He would not increase her anguish of self-reproach by the change
of a muscle in his face. The garrison was trapped and at the mercy of a
merciless enemy. His most passionate desire was to have her taken away
that she might not witness the execution. Why was Sieur Charles La Tour
sitting in the stockade at the head of Fundy Bay while she must endure
the sight of this scaffold?

Marie's women knelt around her crying. Her slow distracted gaze traveled
from Glaud Burge to Jean le Prince, from Renot Babinet to Francois
Bastarack, from Ambroise Tibedeaux along the line of stanch faces to
Edelwald. His calm uplifted countenance--with the horrible platform of
death growing behind it--looked, as it did when he happily met the sea
wind or went singing through trackl