er this victim of the night.
. . . Desnoyers suspected that another sorrow was troubling the mother
still more, but he kept modestly silent. It was she who finally spoke,
between outbursts of grief. . . . Georgette was now in the lodge.
Horror-stricken and shuddering, she had fled there when the invaders had
left the castle. They had kept her in their power until the last minute.

"Oh, Master, don't look at her. . . . She is trembling and sobbing at
the thought that you may speak with her about what she has gone through.
She is almost out of her mind. She longs to die! Ay, my little girl!
. . . And is there no one who will punish these monsters?"

They had come up from the cellars and crossed the bridge, the woman
looking fixedly into the silent waters. The dead body of a swan was
floating upon them. Before their departure, while their horses were
being saddled, two officers had amused themselves by chasing with
revolver shots the birds swimming in the moat. The aquatic plants were
spotted with blood; among the leaves were floating some tufts of
limp white plumage like a bit of washing escaped from the hands of a
laundress.

Don Marcelo and the woman exchanged a compassionate glance, and then
looked pityingly at each other as the sunlight brought out more strongly
their aging, wan appearance.

The passing of these people had destroyed everything. There was no food
left in the castle except some crusts of dry bread forgotten in the
kitchen. "And we have to live, Monsieur!" exclaimed the woman with
reviving energy as she thought of her daughter's need. "We have to
live, if only to see how God punishes them!" The old man shrugged his
shoulders in despair; God? . . . But the woman was right; they had to
live.

With the famished audacity of his early youth, when he was travelling
over boundless tracts of land, driving his herds of cattle, he now
rushed outside the park, hunting for some form of sustenance. He saw
the valley, fair and green, basking in the sun; the groups of trees, the
plots of yellowish soil with the hard spikes of stubble; the hedges in
which the birds were singing--all the summer splendor of a countryside
developed and cultivated during fifteen centuries by dozens and dozens
of generations. And yet--here he was alone at the mercy of chance,
likely to perish with hunger--more alone than when he was crossing the
towering heights of the Andes--those irregular slopes of rocks and
snow wrapped in endless