uliette, standing at the open window, heard Jean stir himself, and
shuffle, in his slippers, toward the gate.

"It is some one who comes on foot," she heard Marie say. "Some
beggar--the roads are full of them. See that he gets no farther than the
gate."

She heard Jean draw back the bolts and answer gruffly, in a few words,
through the interstice of a grudging door, what seemed to be inquiries
made in a voice that was not the voice of a peasant. Marie rose and went
to the gate. In a few minutes they returned, and Juliette drew back from
the window, for they were accompanied by the new-comer, whose boots made
a sharper, clearer sound on the cobble-stones.

"Yes," Juliette heard him explain, "I am an Englishman, but I come from
Monsieur de Gemosac, for all that. And since Mademoiselle is here, I
must see her. It was by chance that I heard, on the road, that there
is fever at Saintes, and that she had returned home. I was on my way to
Saintes to see her and give her my news of her father."

"But what news?" asked Marie, and the answer was lost as the speakers
passed into the doorway, the new-comer evidently leading the way,
the peasant and his wife following without protest, and with that
instinctive obedience to unconscious command which will survive all the
iconoclasm of a hundred revolutions.

There followed a tramping on the stairs and a half-suppressed laugh as
the new-comer stumbled upward. Marie opened the door slowly.

"It is a gentleman," she announced, "who does not give his name."

Juliette de Gemosac was standing at the far side of the table, with the
lamp throwing its full light upon her. She was dressed in white, with a
blue ribbon at her waist and wrists. Another ribbon of the same colour
tied back her hair, which was of a bright brown, with curls that caught
the light in a score of tendrils above her ears. No finished coquette
could have planned a prettier surprise than that which awaited Loo
Barebone, as he made Marie stand aside, and came, hat in hand, into the
room.

He paused for an instant, breathless, before Juliette, who stood, with
a little smile of composed surprise parting her lips. This child, fresh
from the quiet of a convent-school, was in no wise taken aback nor at
a loss how to act. She did not speak, but stood with head erect,
not ungracious, looking at him with clear brown eyes, awaiting his
explanation. And Loo Barebone, all untaught, who had never spoken to a
French lady in his l