ight.

But Henriette, meantime, had made an encounter that caused her to
forget her project for a moment. In some poor outcasts; stranded by the
wayside, she had recognized a family of honest weavers from Bazeilles,
father, mother, and three little girls, of whom the largest was only
nine years old. They were utterly disheartened and forlorn, and so weary
and footsore that they could go no further, and had thrown themselves
down at the foot of a wall.

"Alas! dear lady," the wife and mother said to Henriette, "we have
lost our all. Our house--you know where our house stood on the Place de
l'Eglise--well, a shell came and burned it. Why we and the children did
not stay and share its fate I do not know--"

At these words the three little ones began to cry and sob afresh,
while the mother, in distracted language, gave further details of the
catastrophe.

"The loom, I saw it burn like seasoned kindling wood, and the bed,
the chairs and tables, they blazed like so much straw. And even the
clock--yes, the poor old clock that I tried to save and could not."

"My God! my God!" the man exclaimed, his eyes swimming with tears, "what
is to become of us?"

Henriette endeavored to comfort them, but it was in a voice that
quavered strangely.

"You have been preserved to each other, you are safe and unharmed; your
three little girls are left you. What reason have you to complain?"

Then she proceeded to question them to learn how matters stood in
Bazeilles, whether they had seen her husband, in what state they had
left her house, but in their half-dazed condition they gave conflicting
answers. No, they had not seen M. Weiss. One of the little girls,
however, declared that she had seen him, and that he was lying on the
ground with a great hole in his head, whereon the father gave her a box
on the ear, bidding her hold her tongue and not tell such lies to the
lady. As for the house, they could say with certainty that it was intact
at the time of their flight; they even remembered to have observed, as
they passed it, that the doors and windows were tightly secured, as if
it was quite deserted. At that time, moreover, the only foothold that
the Bavarians had secured for themselves was in the Place de l'Eglise,
and to carry the village they would have to fight for it, street by
street, house by house. They must have been gaining ground since then,
though; all Bazeilles was in flames by that time, like enough, and not
a wall left