Jean burst like a hurricane into the Rue du Bac with the few men of his squad.  At first he could distinguish no one; he thought the barricade had been abandoned.  Then, looking more closely, he perceived a communard extended on the ground between two sand bags; he stirred, he brought his piece to the shoulder, was about to discharge it down the Rue du Bac.  And impelled by blind fate, Jean rushed upon the man and thrust his bayonet through him, nailing him to the barricade.

Maurice had not had time to turn.  He gave a cry and raised his head.  The blinding light of the burning buildings fell full on their faces.

“O Jean, dear old boy, is it you?”

To die, that was what he wished, what he had been longing for.  But to die by his brother’s hand, ah! the cup was too bitter; the thought of death no longer smiled on him.

“Is it you, Jean, old friend?”

Jean, sobered by the terrible shock, looked at him with wild eyes.  They were alone; the other soldiers had gone in pursuit of the fugitives.  About them the conflagrations roared and crackled and blazed up higher than before; great sheets of white flame poured from the windows, while from within came the crash of falling ceilings.  And Jean cast himself on the ground at Maurice’s side, sobbing, feeling him, trying to raise him to see if he might not yet be saved.

“My boy, oh! my poor, poor boy!”

VIII.

When at about nine o’clock the train from Sedan, after innumerable delays along the way, rolled into the Saint-Denis station, the sky to the south was lit up by a fiery glow as if all Paris was burning.  The light had increased with the growing darkness, and now it filled the horizon, climbing constantly higher up the heavens and tingeing with blood-red hues some clouds, that lay off to the eastward in the gloom which the contrast rendered more opaque than ever.

The travelers alighted, Henriette among the first, alarmed by the glare they had beheld from the windows of the cars as they rushed onward across the darkling fields.  The soldiers of a Prussian detachment, moreover, that had been sent to occupy the station, went through the train and compelled the passengers to leave it, while two of their number, stationed on the platform, shouted in guttural French: 

“Paris is burning.  All out here! this train goes no further.  Paris is burning, Paris is burning!”

Henriette experienced a terrible shock. Mon Dieu! was she too late, then?  Receiving no reply from Maurice to her two last letters, the alarming news from Paris had filled her with such mortal terror that she determined to leave Remilly and come and try to find her brother in the great city.  For months past her life at Uncle Fouchard’s had been a melancholy one; the troops occupying the village and the surrounding country had become harsher and more exacting as the resistance of Paris was protracted, and now that peace was declared and the regiments