It was at this crisis that Jean rose from his bed and, softly opening his door, looked out into the passage.  Although he generally gave but small attention to the various noises that reached him from the farmhouse, the unusual activity that prevailed this evening, the trampling of feet, the shouts and cries, in the end excited his curiosity.  And it was to the retirement of his sequestered chamber that Silvine, sobbing and disheveled, came for shelter, her form convulsed by such a storm of anguish that at first he could not grasp the meaning of the rambling, inarticulate words that fell from her blanched lips.  She kept constantly repeating the same terrified gesture, as if to thrust from before her eyes some hideous, haunting vision.  At last he understood, the entire abominable scene was pictured clearly to his mind:  the traitorous ambush, the slaughter, the mother, her little one clinging to her skirts, watching unmoved the murdered father, whose life-blood was slowly ebbing; and it froze his marrow—­the peasant and the soldier was sick at heart with anguished horror.  Ah, hateful, cruel war! that changed all those poor folks to ravening wolves, bespattering the child with the father’s blood!  An accursed sowing, to end in a harvest of blood and tears!

Resting on the chair where she had fallen, covering with frantic kisses little Charlot, who clung, sobbing, to her bosom, Silvine repeated again and again the one unvarying phrase, the cry of her bleeding heart.

“Ah, my poor child, they will no more say you are a Prussian!  Ah, my poor child, they will no more say you are a Prussian!”

Meantime Father Fouchard had returned and was in the kitchen.  He had come hammering at the door with the authority of the master, and there was nothing left to do but open to him.  The surprise he experienced was not exactly an agreeable one on beholding the dead man outstretched on his table and the blood-filled tub beneath.  It followed naturally, his disposition not being of the mildest, that he was very angry.

“You pack of rascally slovens! say, couldn’t you have gone outdoors to do your dirty work?  Do you take my place for a shambles, eh? coming here and ruining the furniture with such goings-on?” Then, as Sambuc endeavored to mollify him and explain matters, the old fellow went on with a violence that was enhanced by his fears:  “And what do you suppose I am to do with the carcass, pray?  Do you consider it a gentlemanly thing to do, to come to a man’s house like this and foist a stiff off on him without so much as saying by your leave?  Suppose a patrol should come along, what a nice fix I should be in! but precious little you fellows care whether I get my neck stretched or not.  Now listen:  do you take that body at once and carry it away from here; if you don’t, by G-d, you and I will have a settlement!  You hear me; take it by the head, take it by the heels, take it any way you please, but get it out of here and don’t let there be a hair of it remaining in this room at the end of three minutes from now!”