he altar, her feet touching the altar itself, was the girl--his
sister--who had kept her drunken lover from assaulting him. The girl was
dead--there was a knife-wound in her breast. Sick at the sight I left
the place, and went on, almost mechanically, to Voban's house. It was
level with the ground, a crumpled heap of ruins. I passed Lancy's house,
in front of which I had fought with Gabord; it too was broken to pieces.

As I turned away I heard a loud noise, as of an explosion, and I
supposed it to be some magazine. I thought of it no more at the time.
Voban must be found; that was more important. I must know of Alixe
first, and I felt sure that if any one guessed her whereabouts it would
be he: she would have told him where she was going, if she had fled;
if she were dead, who so likely to know, this secret, elusive, vengeful
watcher? Of Doltaire I had heard nothing; I would seek him out when I
knew of Alixe. He could not escape me in this walled town. I passed on
for a time without direction, for I seemed not to know where I might
find the barber. Our sentries already patrolled the streets, and our
bugles were calling on the heights, with answering calls from the
fleet in the basin. Night came down quickly, the stars shone out in the
perfect blue, and, as I walked along, broken walls, shattered houses,
solitary pillars, looked mystically strange. It was painfully quiet, as
if a beaten people had crawled away into the holes our shot and shell
had made, to hide their misery. Now and again a gaunt face looked out
from a hiding-place, and drew back again in fear at sight of me. Once
a drunken woman spat at me and cursed me; once I was fired at; and
many times from dark corners I heard voices crying, "Sauvez-moi--ah,
sauvez-moi, bon Dieu!" Once I stood for many minutes and watched our
soldiers giving biscuits and their own share of rum to homeless French
peasants hovering round the smouldering ruins of a house which carcasses
had destroyed.

And now my wits came back to me, my purposes, the power to act, which
for a couple of hours had seemed to be in abeyance. I hurried through
narrow streets to the cathedral. There it stood, a shattered mass,
its sides all broken, its roof gone, its tall octagonal tower alone
substantial and unchanged. Coming to its rear, I found Babette's little
house, with open door, and I went in. The old grandfather sat in his
corner, with a lighted candle on the table near him, across his knees
Jea