might have been detected by him if he had guarded his
post. The jutting of rocks probably hid them from sentinels below.

"D'Aulnay is coming nearer," said the Swiss, looking with haggard
indifferent eyes at these preparations, and an occasional head venturing
above the fresh ridge. Marguerite threw her arms around her husband's
neck, and hung on him with kisses.

"Come on, then," he said, speaking with the desperate conviction of a
man who has lost himself. "I have to do it. You will see me hang for
this, but I'll do it for you."

XV.

A SOLDIER.

Marie felt herself called through the deepest depths of sleep, and sat
up in the robe of fur which she had wrapped around her for her night
bivouac. There was some alarm at her door. The enemy might be on the
walls. She tingled with the intense return of life, and was opening the
door without conscious motion. Nobody stood outside in the hall except
the dwarf, whose aureole of foxy hair surrounded features pinched by
anxiety.

"Madame Marie--Madame Marie! The Swiss has gone to give up the fort to
D'Aulnay."

"Has gone?"

"He came down from the turret with his wife, who persuaded him. I
listened all night on the stairs. D'Aulnay is ready to mount the wall
when he gives the signal. I had to hide me until the woman and the Swiss
passed below. They are now going to the wall to give the signal."

Through Marie passed that worst shock of all human experience. To see
your trusted ally transmuted into your secret most deadly foe, sickens
the heart as death surely cannot sicken it. Like many a pierced wretch
who has collapsed suddenly into the dust while the stab yet held the
knife, she whispered feebly,--

"He could not do that!"

The stern blackness of her eyes seemed to annihilate all the rest of her
face. Was rock itself stable under-foot? Why should one care to prolong
life, when life only proved how cruel and worthless are the people for
whom we labor?

"Madame Marie, he is now doing it. He was to hold up a ladder on the
wall."

"Which wall?"

"This one--where the gate is."

Marie looked through the glass in her door which opened toward the
battlements, rubbed aside moisture, and looked again. While one breath
could be drawn Klussman was standing in the dawn-light with a ladder
raised overhead. She caught up a pair of long pistols which had lain
beside her all night.

"Rouse the men below--quick!" she said to Le Rossignol, and ran up the
steps to