should be our street," said Croisette.

I nodded. At the same moment I espied, half-way down it, the sign we
needed and pointed to it, But ah! were we in time? Or too late? That
was the question. By a single impulse we broke into a run, and shot
down the roadway at speed. A few yards short of the Head of Erasmus we
came, one by one, Croisette first, to a full stop. A full stop!

The house opposite the bookseller's was sacked! gutted from top to
bottom. It was a tall house, immediately fronting the street, and
every window in it was broken. The door hung forlornly on one hinge,
glaring cracks in its surface showing where the axe had splintered it.
Fragments of glass and ware, hung out and shattered in sheer
wantonness, strewed the steps: and down one corner of the latter a
dark red stream trickled--to curdle by and by in the gutter. Whence
came the stream? Alas! there was something more to be seen yet,
something our eyes instinctively sought last of all. The body of a man.

It lay on the threshold, the head hanging back, the wide glazed eyes
looking up to the summer sky whence the sweltering heat would soon pour
down upon it. We looked shuddering at the face. It was that of a
servant, a valet who had been with Louis at Caylus. We recognised him
at once for we had known and liked him. He had carried our guns on the
hills a dozen times, and told us stories of the war. The blood crawled
slowly from him. He was dead.

Croisette began to shake all over. He clutched one of the pillars,
which bore up the porch, and pressed his face against its cold surface,
hiding his eyes from the sight. The worst had come. In our hearts I
think we had always fancied some accident would save our friend, some
stranger warn him.

"Oh, poor, poor Kit!" Croisette cried, bursting suddenly into violent
sobs. "Oh, Kit! Kit!"

CHAPTER X.

HAU, HAU, HUGUENOTS!

His late Majesty, Henry the Fourth, I remember--than whom no braver man
wore sword, who loved danger indeed for its own sake, and courted it as
a mistress--could never sleep on the night before an action. I have
heard him say himself that it was so before the fight at Arques.
Croisette partook of this nature too, being high-strung and apt to be
easily over-wrought, but never until the necessity for exertion had
passed away: while Marie and I, though not a whit stouter at a pinch,
were slower to feel and less easy to move--more Germanic in fact.

I name t