key you gave me of the cupboard. I was positively afraid to. I am
virtuous, I hope, but there are limits to one's power to resist
temptation. I know you told me to take anything I liked but if I had
once began I could never have stopped."

"Then we will have a feast to-morrow, Rene. Ask all the others in to
supper, but you must act as cook. Tell them not to come to see me till
eight o'clock. If they kept dropping in all day it would be too much for
me. I wish Dampierre could be with us, but he has not got on so fast as
I have. His wounds were never so serious, but the doctor said the bones
were badly smashed and take longer to heal. He says he is not a good
patient either, but worries and fidgets. I don't think those visits of
Minette were good for him, the doctor had to put a stop to them. He
would talk and excite himself so. However, I hear that he is likely to
be out in another fortnight."

"By that time it will be all over," Rend said, "negotiations are going
on now, and they say that in three or four days we shall surrender."

"The best thing to do, Rene. Ever since that last sortie failed all hope
has been at an end, and there has been no point in going on suffering,
for I suppose by this time the suffering has been very severe."

"Not so very severe, Cuthbert. Of course, we have been out of meat for a
long time, for the ration is so small it is scarcely worth calling meat,
but the flour held out well and so did the wine and most other things. A
few hundred have been killed by the Prussian shells, but with that
exception the mortality has not been very greatly above the average,
except that smallpox has been raging and has carried off a large number.
Among young children, too, the mortality has been heavy, owing to the
want of milk and things of that sort. I should doubt if there has been a
single death from absolute starvation."

To M. Goude's students that supper at Cuthbert Harrington's was a
memorable event. The master himself was there. Two large hams, and
dishes prepared from preserved meats were on the table, together with an
abundance of good wine. It was the first reunion they had had since the
one before the sortie, and it was only the gaps among their number, and
the fact that their host and several of their comrades were still weak,
and greatly changed in appearance, that restrained their spirits from
breaking into hilarity.

The next morning Madame de Millefleurs' carriage came to the door and
C