all. Try to find the leader of the attacking party, and
bring him along to Crecy with the Englishman; but unless they are
in very small numbers do not trouble about the others. Now en avant;
citizen Chauvelin might be glad of your help. And--stay--order all the
men to dismount, and take the horses out of one of the coaches, then
let the men you are taking with you each lead a horse, or even two, and
stable them all in the farm buildings. I shall not need them, and could
not spare any of my men for the work later on. Remember that, above
all, silence is the order. When you are ready to start, come back to me
here."

The sergeant moved away, and Marguerite heard him transmitting the
citizen agent's orders to the soldiers. The dismounting was carried
on in wonderful silence--for silence had been one of the principal
commands--only one or two words reached her ears.

"First section and first half of second section fall in, right wheel.
First section each take two horses on the lead. Quietly now there; don't
tug at his bridle--let him go."

And after that a simple report:

"All ready, citizen!"

"Good!" was the response. "Now detail your corporal and two men to come
here to me, so that we may put the Englishman in irons, and take him
at once to the chapel, and four men to stand guard at the doors of the
other coach."

The necessary orders were given, and after that there came the curt
command:

"En avant!"

The sergeant, with his squad and all the horses, was slowly moving away
in the night. The horses' hoofs hardly made a noise on the soft carpet
of pine-needles and of dead fallen leaves, but the champing of the bits
was of course audible, and now and then the snorting of some poor, tired
horse longing for its stable.

Somehow in Marguerite's fevered mind this departure of a squad of men
seemed like the final flitting of her last hope; the slow agony of the
familiar sounds, the retreating horses and soldiers moving away amongst
the shadows, took on a weird significance. Heron had given his last
orders. Percy, helpless and probably unconscious, would spend the night
in that dank chapel, while she and Armand would be taken back to Crecy,
driven to death like some insentient animals to the slaughter.

When the grey dawn would first begin to peep through the branches of the
pines Percy would be led back to Paris and the guillotine, and she and
Armand will have been sacrificed to the hatred and revenge of brutes.