o down!"

He cast a glance at La Tribe, but he got none in return, and he was
preparing to do her bidding when a cry of dismay broke from those who
still had their eyes bent downwards. The messenger, waving the letter in
a last appeal, had held it too loosely; a light air, as treacherous, as
unexpected, had snatched it from his hand, and bore it--even as the
Countess, drawn by the cry, sprang to the parapet--fifty paces from him.
A moment it floated in the air, eddying, rising, falling; then, light as
thistledown, it touched the water and began to sink.

The messenger uttered frantic lamentations, and stamped the causeway in
his rage. The Countess only looked, and looked, until the rippling crest
of a baby wave broke over the tiny venture, and with its freight of
tidings it sank from sight.

The man, silent now, stared a moment, then shrugged his shoulders.

"Well, 'tis fortunate it was his," he cried brutally, "and not His
Excellency's, or my back had suffered! And now," he added impatiently,
"by your leave, what answer?"

What answer? Ah, God, what answer? The men who leant on the parapet,
rude and coarse as they were, felt the tragedy of the question and the
dilemma, guessed what they meant to her, and looked everywhere save at
her.

What answer? Which of the two was to live? Which die--shamefully?
Which? Which?

"Tell him--to come back--an hour before sunset," she muttered.

They told him and he went; and one by one the men began to go too, and
stole from the roof, leaving her standing alone, her face to the shore,
her hands resting on the parapet. The light breeze which blew off the
land stirred loose ringlets of her hair, and flattened the thin robe
against her sunlit figure. So had she stood a thousand times in old
days, in her youth, in her maidenhood. So in her father's time had she
stood to see her lover come riding along the sands to woo her! So had
she stood to welcome him on the eve of that fatal journey to Paris!
Thence had others watched her go with him. The men remembered--remembered
all; and one by one they stole shamefacedly away, fearing lest she should
speak or turn tragic eyes on them.

True, in their pity for her was no doubt of the end, or thought of the
victim who must suffer--of Tavannes. They, of Poitou, who had not been
with him, knew nothing of him; they cared as little. He was a northern
man, a stranger, a man of the sword, who had seized her--so they heard--by
the