pieces had been hacked away by some deliberately destructive
hand. I glanced at Miss Falconer, whose eyes had been following mine.

"They tore down the tapestries," she said beneath her breath. "They
slashed the old portraits with their swords and broke the windows
and took away the statues and candlesticks and plate. They cut up the
furniture and had it used for fire-wood; and the German captain and his
officers had a feast here and drank to the fall of Paris and ordered
their soldiers to burn the village to the ground. Oh, I don't like
the place any more; too much has happened. And--and I don't like
Marie-Jeanne's not being here, Mr. Bayne. I feel as if there were
something wrong about it. I believe I am a little--just a little
afraid!"

"Come, now, you don't expect me to believe that, do you?" I countered
promptly. "Because I won't. Why, it's your pluck that has kept me up
all day. Just the same, on general principles, I'll take a look round
if you'll allow me. Here's a chair, and if you will rest a minute, I'll
guarantee to find out."

The chair I mentioned was standing near the chimney, and as I spoke I
walked over to it and started to spin it round. It resisted me heavily;
I bent over it, lifting my candle. Then I uttered an exclamation, stood
petrified, and stared.

In the chair, concealed from us until now by the high carved back
of wood, was something which at first looked like a huddled mass of
garments, but which on closer scrutiny resolved itself into a woman in
a striped dress, an apron, and a pair of heavy shoes. There was a cut
on her cheek, a bruise on her forehead. Locks of graying hair straggled
from beneath her disarranged white cap, and she glared at me from a
lean, sallow face with a pair of terrified eyes.

She must be dead, I thought. No living woman could sit so still and
stare so wildly. The scene in the inn garage rushed back upon me, and
I must say that my blood turned cold. But she was alive, I saw now; she
was certainly breathing. And an instant later I realized why she stayed
so immobile; she was bound hand and foot to the chair she sat in, and
a colored handkerchief, her own doubtless, had been twisted across her
mouth to form a gag.

"I think," I head myself saying, "that we have been maligning
Marie-Jeanne."

A choked, frightened cry from Miss Falconer made me wheel about sharply,
to find her staring not a me, but at the further wall. Prepared now for
anything under heaven, I fo