cowards. She must and she shall! If we don't put a
stop to her goings on, she will soon leave us without the power of
saying our soul is our own, and we are great fools not to have seen this
sooner."

"Make her ask our pardon."

"On her knee."

"On both knees."

"Or we will serve her precisely the same as we did her protegee, Mont
Saint-Jean!"

"Down on her knees! Down with her!"

"Lo! we are cowards, are we?"

"Dare to say it again!"

Fleur-de-Marie allowed this tumult to pass away, ere she replied to the
many furious voices that were raging around her. Then, casting a mild
and melancholy glance at the exasperated crowd, she said to La Louve,
who persisted in vociferating, "Will you dare to call us cowards again?"

"You? Oh, no, not you! I call this poor woman, whom you have so roughly
treated, whom you have dragged through the mud, and whose clothes you
have nearly torn off, a coward. Do you not see how she trembles, and
dares not even look at you? No, no! I say again, 'tis she who is a
coward, for being thus afraid of you."

Fleur-de-Marie had touched the right chord; in vain might she have
appealed to their sense of justice and duty, in order to allay their
bitter irritation against poor Mont Saint-Jean; the stupid or
brutalised minds of the prisoners would alike have been inaccessible to
her pleadings; but, by addressing herself to that sentiment of
generosity, which is never wholly extinct, even in the most depraved
characters, she kindled a spark of pity, that required but skilful
management to fan into a flame of commiseration, instead of hatred and
violence. La Louve, amid their continued murmurings against La Goualeuse
and her protegee, felt, and confessed, that their conduct had been both
unwomanly and cowardly.

Fleur-de-Marie would not carry her first triumph too far. She contented
herself with merely saying:

"Surely, if this poor creature, whom you call yours, to tease, to
torment, to ill-use,--in fact, your _souffre douleur_,--be not worthy of
your pity, her infant has done nothing to offend you. Did you forget,
when striking the mother, that the unborn babe might suffer from your
blows? And when she besought your mercy, 'twas not for herself, but her
child. When she craves of you a morsel of bread, if, indeed, you have it
to spare, 'tis not to satisfy her own hunger she begs it, but that her
infant may live; and when, with streaming eyes, she implored of you to
spare the few rags she h