ould be called, keeping
watch by night over the safety of his village, and by day doing all he
could to aid the deserted wives and mothers of the place by the tilling
of their ground for them and the tending of such poor cattle as were
left in their desolate fields. He and Margot and Reine Allix, between
them, fed many mouths that would otherwise have been closed in death
by famine, and denied themselves all except the barest and most meagre
subsistence, that they might give away the little they possessed.

And all this while the war went on, but seemed far from them, so
seldom did any tidings of it pierce the seclusion in which they dwelt.
By-and-by, as the autumn went on, they learned a little more. Fugitives
coming to the smithy for a horse's shoe; women fleeing to their old
village homes from their base, gay life in the city; mandates from
the government of defence sent to every hamlet in the country; stray
news-sheets brought in by carriers or hawkers and hucksters--all these
by degrees told them of the peril of their country, vaguely indeed, and
seldom truthfully, but so that by mutilated rumours they came at last to
know the awful facts of the fate of Sedan, the fall of the Empire, the
siege of Paris. It did not alter their daily lives; it was still too far
off and too impalpable. But a foreboding, a dread, an unspeakable woe
settled down on them. Already their lands and cattle had been harassed
to yield provision for the army and large towns; already their best
horses had been taken for the siege-trains and the forage-waggons;
already their ploughshares were perforce idle, and their children cried
because of the scarcity of nourishment; already the iron of war had
entered their souls.

The little street at evening was mournful and very silent; the few who
talked spoke in whispers, lest a spy should hear them, and the young
ones had no strength to play--they wanted food.

"It is as it was in my youth," said Reine Allix, eating her piece of
black bread and putting aside the better food prepared for her, that she
might save it, unseen, for the "child."

It was horrible to her and to all of them to live in that continual
terror of an unknown foe, that perpetual expectation of some ghastly,
shapeless misery. They were quiet,--so quiet!--but by all they heard
they knew that any night, as they went to their beds, the thunder of
cannon might awaken them; any morning, as they looked on their beloved
fields, they knew