ood upon the
banks of the Loire, about a mile from Amboise, the flour mill of one
Jean Calvet. For six generations it had passed from a Calvet to a
Calvet, son succeeding father as Amurath an Amurath, and the Moulin
Fleche d'Or was as well known to the countryside as Amboise itself.
The kirkyard or the grinding stones; humanity must needs find its way
to both.

When harvests were fat, and corn plentiful, its stones hummed from
daylight to dark to the blent music of the creaking wheel and the
splash-splash of the water which drove it. In lean years, when war or
famine was abroad, and thanks to England these years were not few, the
sluice was lifted, and in place of the hoarse murmur and complaint of
the grinding stones and lumbering wheel there was the soft purr of the
millrace, and the Calvet of his generation lived, like a turtle, on his
own fat, waiting for better days. And sooner or later these always
came, and with their coming grew the prosperity of the Golden Arrow.
Corn and the human heart must needs be ground while the world lasts,
and perhaps it is as much out of the grinding of the latter as the
former that life is strengthened. Then came a day which brought an end
to more than the prosperity of Jean Calvet the sixth.

Some clocks wear out, running down with little spurts of life and
longer intervals of dumbness; others end with a sudden crashing of the
pendulum while in its full swing, and a wild, convulsive whirr of the
jarred wheels. One moment the sober tick tells that all is well, the
next--silence. So was it with Calvet's mill.

In the fortune, or misfortune, of war an Englishman, one Sir John
Stone, riding that way with his band of marauders, little better than
licensed brigands, found Amboise too tough a nut for his teeth, and
harried the Calvets in pure wantonness. Over the tree-tops the
garrison of Amboise could see the smoke of the burning, but they were
too weak to venture succour.

Calvet must fend for himself lest Calvet and Amboise both end in the
one ruin. There was little defence, but that little was grimly in
earnest and yet more grim the revenge of the attack. For that
generation both pity and mercy had fled France. Jean Calvet the
younger, he who should have been the seventh of his line, was coursed
in the open like a hare, but turned at the last and died at bay as a
wolf dies. Behind the barred door were Jean the sixth, his two younger
sons, and the dead man's wife. The wo