o all: to a Huguenot, very much. It chanced that these two rode on to
the bridge side by side, and the memory of their last crossing--the
remembrance that, on their journey north a month before, they had crossed
it hand-in-hand with the prospect of passing their lives together, and
with no faintest thought of the events which were to ensue, flashed into
the mind of each of them. It deepened the flush which exertion had
brought to the woman's cheek, then left it paler than before. A minute
earlier she had been wroth with her old lover; she had held him
accountable for the outbreak in the town and this hasty retreat; now her
anger died as she looked and she remembered. In the man, shallower of
feeling and more alive to present contingencies, the uppermost emotion as
he trod the bridge was one of surprise and congratulation.

He could not at first believe in their good fortune. "_Mon Dieu_!" he
cried, "we are crossing!" And then again in a lower tone, "We are
crossing! We are crossing!" And he looked at her.

It was impossible that she should not look back; that she who had ceased
to be angry should not feel and remember; impossible that her answering
glance should not speak to his heart. Below them, as on that day a month
earlier, when they had crossed the bridges going northward, the broad
shallow river ran its course in the sunshine, its turbid currents
gleaming and flashing about the sandbanks and osier-beds. To the eye,
the landscape, save that the vintage was farther advanced and the harvest
in part gathered in, was the same. But how changed were their relations,
their prospects, their hopes, who had then crossed the river
hand-in-hand, planning a life to be passed together.

The young man's rage boiled up at the thought. Too vividly, too sharply
it showed him the wrongs which he had suffered at the hands of the man
who rode behind him, the man who even now drove him on and ordered him
and insulted him. He forgot that he might have perished in the general
massacre if Count Hannibal had not intervened. He forgot that Count
Hannibal had spared him once and twice. He laid on his enemy's shoulders
the guilt of all, the blood of all: and, as quick on the thought of his
wrongs and his fellows' wrongs followed the reflection that with every
league they rode southwards the chance of requital grew, he cried again,
and this time joyously--

"We are crossing! A little, and we shall be in our own land!"

The