tramped at intervals up the turret stair, carrying
ammunition.

The day had dawned rainless but sullen. It was Good Friday. The women
huddling in the hall out of their usual haunts noticed Marguerite's
refusal even of the broth the cook offered her. She was restless, like a
leopard, and seemed full of electrical currents which found no discharge
except in the flicker of her eyes. Leaving the group of settles by the
fireplace where these simple families felt more at home and least
intrusive on the grandeur of the hall, she put herself on a distant
chair with her face turned from them. This gave the women a chance to
backbite her, to note her roused mood, and to accuse her among
themselves of wishing evil to the fort and consequently to their
husbands.

"She hath the closest mouth in Acadia," murmured one. "Doth anybody in
these walls certainly know that she came from D'Aulnay?"

"The Swiss, her husband, told it."

"And if she find means to go back to D'Aulnay, it will appear where she
came from," suggested Zelie.

"I would he had her now," said the first woman. "I have that feeling for
her that I have for a cat with its hairs on end."

Madame La Tour came to the hall and sat briefly and alone at her own
table to take her dinner and supper. Later in the siege she stood and
merely took food from the cook's hands, talking with and comforting her
women while she ate. The surgeon of the fort was away with La Tour. She
laid bandages ready, and felt obliged to dress not only the first but
every wound received.

Pierre Doucett was brought from one of the bastions stunned and
bleeding, and his wife rose up with her baby in her arms, filling the
hall with her cries. The baby and her neighbors' children were moved to
join her. But the eye of her lady was as awful as Pierre's wound. Her
outcry sunk to a whimper; she hushed the children, and swept them off
the settle so Pierre could lie there, and even paid out the roll of
bandage with one hand while her lady used it. Marie controlled her own
faintness; for a woman on whom a man's labors are imposed must bear
them.

The four little children stood with fingers in their mouths, looking at
these grim tokens of war. All day long they heard the crashing or
thumping of balls, and felt the leap and rebound of cannon. The cook,
when he came down from a bastion to attend to his kettles, gave them
nice bits to eat, and in spite of solemnity, they counted it a holiday
to be in the ha