was certainly the hero of Monsieur Urbain's
vintage, the centre figure of that sunny day.

Angelot felt himself drawn to the soldier, whose return home had touched
him with so strange a thrill. There was a spark of the heroic in this
young fellow. Angelot found himself watching him, listening to him,
perhaps as a kind of refuge from the cold looks of his relations; for
even Riette dared not run after him as of old.

When purple shadows began to lie long in the yellow evening glow, and
the crickets sang louder than ever, and sweet scents came out of the
warm ground--when the day's work was nearly done, Angelot walked away
with Martin from the vineyard. He wanted some of those stirring stories
to himself, it seemed. If one must go away and fight, if the old Angevin
life became once for all impossible, then might it not be better under
the eagles, as his wise father thought, than with that army and on that
side for which, in spite of his mother and his uncle, he could not rouse
in himself any enthusiasm? True, he liked little he knew of the Empire
and its men, except this poor lamed conscript; but always in his
whirling thoughts there was that will-o'-the-wisp, that wavering star
of hope that Helene's father had seemed to offer him. Could he forsake,
for any other reason, the sight of the forbidden walls that held her!

He and Martin went away up the lane together, and climbed along the side
of the moor towards La Joubardiere, Martin telling wild stories of
battles and sieges, of long marching and privation, Angelot listening
fascinated, as he helped the crippled soldier over the rough ground.

Martin had been wounded under Suchet at the siege of Tortosa, so that he
had seen little of the more recent events of the war, but his personal
adventures, before and since, had been exciting; and not the least
wonderful part of the story was his wandering life, a wounded beggar on
his way back across the Pyrenees into his own country. As Angelot
listened, the politics of French parties faded away, and he only
realised that this was a Frenchman, fighting the enemies of France and
giving his young life for her without a word of regret. Napoleon might
have conquered the world, it seemed, with such conscript soldiers as
this. These, not men like Ratoneau or Georges de Sainfoy, were the
heroes of the war.

The sun had set, and swift darkness was coming down, before the young
men reached La Joubardiere. The lane, the same in which th