where the weapons are hidden. If you do, I will
leave you your life. If you do not--"

"If I do not?"

"You will be shot."

Bernadou was silent; his eyes glanced through the mass of soldiers
to the little cottage under the trees opposite. The two there were
straining to behold him, but the soldiers pushed them back, so that in
the flare of the torches they could not see, nor in the tumult hear. He
thanked God for it.

"Your choice?" asked the uhlan, impatiently, after a moment's pause.

Bernadou's lips were white, but they did not tremble as he answered,
"I am no traitor." And his eyes, as he spoke, went softly to the little
porch where the light glowed from that hearth beside which he would
never again sit with the creatures he loved around him.

The German looked at him. "Is that a boast, or a fact?"

"I am no traitor," Bernadou answered, simply, once more.

The Prussian gave a sign to his troopers. There was the sharp report of
a double shot, and Bernadou fell dead. One bullet had pierced his brain,
the other was bedded in his lungs. The soldiers kicked aside the warm
and quivering body. It was only a peasant killed!

With a shriek that rose above the roar of the wind, and cut like steel
to every human heart that beat there, Reine Allix forced her way through
the throng, and fell on her knees beside him, and caught him in her
arms, and laid his head upon her breast, where he had used to sleep his
softest sleep in infancy and childhood. "It is God's will! it is God's
will!" she muttered; and then she laughed--a laugh so terrible that the
blood of the boldest there ran cold.

Margot followed her and looked, and stood dry-eyed and silent; then
flung herself and the child she carried in her arms beneath the hoof
of the white charger. "End your work!" she shrieked to them. "You have
killed him--kill us. Have you not mercy enough for that?"

The horse, terrified and snorting blood, plunged and trampled the
ground; his fore foot struck the child's golden head and stamped its
face out of all human likeness. Some peasants pulled Margot from the
lashing hoofs; she was quite dead, though neither wound nor bruise was
on her.

Reine Allix neither looked nor paused. With all her strength she had
begun to drag the body of Bernadou across the threshold of his house.
"He shall lie at home, he shall lie at home," she muttered. She would
not believe that already he was dead. With all the force of her earliest
womanhood s