s beat the thick bushes right
and left with rash intrepidity, and replied to the Chouans with a steady
fire.

Mademoiselle de Verneuil's first impulse was to jump from the carriage
and run back along the road until she was out of sight of the battle;
but ashamed of her fears, and moved by the feeling which impels us all
to act nobly under the eyes of those we love, she presently stood still,
endeavoring to watch the combat coolly.

The marquis followed her, took her hand, and placed it on his breast.

"I was afraid," she said, smiling, "but now--"

Just then her terrified maid cried out: "Marie, take care!"

But as she said the words, Francine, who was springing from the
carriage, felt herself grasped by a strong hand. The sudden weight
of that enormous hand made her shriek violently; she turned, and was
instantly silenced on recognizing Marche-a-Terre.

"Twice I owe to chance," said the marquis to Mademoiselle de Verneuil,
"the revelation of the sweetest secrets of the heart. Thanks to Francine
I now know you bear the gracious name of Marie,--Marie, the name I have
invoked in my distresses,--Marie, a name I shall henceforth speak in
joy, and never without sacrifice, mingling religion and love. There can
be no wrong where prayer and love go together."

They clasped hands, looked silently into each other's eyes, and the
excess of their emotion took away from them the power to express it.

"There's no danger for _the rest of you_," Marche-a-Terre was saying
roughly to Francine, giving to his hoarse and guttural voice a
reproachful tone, and emphasizing his last words in a way to stupefy the
innocent peasant-girl. For the first time in her life she saw ferocity
in that face. The moonlight seemed to heighten the effect of it. The
savage Breton, holding his cap in one hand and his heavy carbine in the
other, dumpy and thickset as a gnome, and bathed in that white light the
shadows of which give such fantastic aspects to forms, seemed to belong
more to a world of goblins than to reality. This apparition and its
tone of reproach came upon Francine with the suddenness of a phantom.
He turned rapidly to Madame du Gua, with whom he exchanged a few eager
words, which Francine, who had somewhat forgotten the dialect of Lower
Brittany, did not understand. The lady seemed to be giving him a series
of orders. The short conference ended by an imperious gesture of the
lady's hand pointing out to the Chouan the lovers standing a