--all alike in their serene indifference to danger;
often pausing to pick up among the dead their own brethren who had
been slaughtered in the midst of their task. Now and then they came
on sinister forms apparently engaged in the same duty of tending the
wounded and dead, but in truth murderous plunderers, to whom the dead
and the dying were equal harvests. Did the wounded man attempt to resist
the foul hands searching for their spoil, they added another wound more
immediately mortal, grinning as they completed on the dead the robbery
they had commenced on the dying.

Raoul de Vandemar had been all the earlier part of the day with the
assistants of the ambulance over which he presided, attached to the
battalions of the National Guard in a quarter remote from that in which
his brother had fought and fallen. When those troops, later in the day,
were driven from the Montmedy plateau, which they had at first carried,
Raoul repassed towards the plateau at Villiers, on which the dead lay
thickest. On the way he heard a vague report of the panic which
had dispersed the Mobiles of whom Enguerrand was in command, and of
Enguerrand's vain attempt to inspirit them. But his fate was not known.
There, at midnight, Raoul is still searching among the ghastly heaps and
pools of blood, lighted from afar by the blaze from the observatory of
Montmartre, and more near at hand by the bivouac fires extended along
the banks to the left of the Marne, while everywhere about the field
flitted the lanterns of the Frere Chretiens. Suddenly, in the dimness of
a spot cast into shadow by an incompleted earthwork, he observed a small
sinister figure perched on the breast of some wounded soldier, evidently
not to succour. He sprang forward and seized a hideous-looking urchin,
scarcely twelve years old, who held in one hand a small crystal locket,
set in filigree gold, torn from the soldier's breast, and lifted high in
the other a long case-knife. At a glance Raoul recognised the holy relic
he had given to Enguerrand, and, flinging the precocious murderer to be
seized by his assistants, he cast himself beside his brother. Enguerrand
still breathed, and his languid eyes brightened as he knew the dear
familiar face. He tried to speak, but his voice failed, and he shook his
head sadly, but still with a faint smile on his lips. They lifted him
tenderly, and placed him on a litter. The movement, gentle as it was,
brought back pain, and with the pain strength