he nearest
of this black brood--though it be his brother? If so, God's curse on
him!"

"Amen! Amen!"

"So, and so only," cried the first, "shall there be faith in our land!
And our children, our little maids, shall lie safe in their beds!"

"Amen! Amen!"

The speaker's chin sank on his breast, and with his last word the light
died out of his eyes. La Tribe looked at him curiously, then at the
others. Last of all at Tignonville, on whose face he fancied that he
surprised a faint smile. Yet Tignonville's tone when he spoke was grave
enough.

"You have heard," he said. "Do you blame us?"

"I cannot," the minister answered, shivering. "I cannot." He had been
for a while beyond the range of these feelings; and in the greenwood,
under God's heaven, with the sunshine about him, they jarred on him. Yet
he could not blame men who had suffered as these had suffered; who were
maddened, as these were maddened, by the gravest wrongs which it is
possible for one man to inflict on another. "I dare not," he continued
sorrowfully. "But in God's name I offer you a higher and a nobler
errand."

"We need none," Tignonville muttered impatiently.

"Yet many others need you," La Tribe answered in a tone of rebuke. "You
are not aware that the man you follow bears a packet from the King for
the hands of the magistrates of Angers?"

"Ha! Does he?"

"Bidding them do at Angers as his Majesty has done in Paris?"

The men broke into cries of execration. "But he shall not see Angers!"
they swore. "The blood that he has shed shall choke him by the way! And
as he would do to others it shall be done to him."

La Tribe shuddered as he listened, as he looked. Try as he would, the
thirst of these men for vengeance appalled him.

"How?" he said. "He has a score and more with him and you are only six."

"Seven now," Tignonville answered with a smile.

"True, but--"

"And he lies to-night at La Fleche? That is so?"

"It was his intention this morning."

"At the old King's Inn at the meeting of the great roads?"

"It was mentioned," La Tribe admitted, with a reluctance he did not
comprehend. "But if the night be fair he is as like as not to lie in the
fields."

One of the men pointed to the sky. A dark bank of cloud fresh risen from
the ocean, and big with tempest, hung low in the west.

"See! God will deliver him into our hands!" he cried.

Tignonville nodded. "If he lie there," he said, "He will." And the