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 pale, bleeding, bruised, covered with mire. The Prussians, he told them, had forced him to be their guide, had knotted him tight to a trooper's saddle, and had dragged him with them until he was half dead with fatigue and pain. At night he had broken from them and had fled: they were close at hand, he said, and had burned the town from end to end because a man had fired at them from a housetop. That was all he knew.

Bernadou, who had gone out to hear his news, returned into the house and sat down and hid his face within his hands.

"If I resist you are all lost," he muttered. "And yet to yield like a cur!"

It was a piteous question, whether to follow the instinct in him and see his birth—place in flames and his family slaughtered for his act, or to crush out the manhood in him and live, loathing himself as a coward for evermore?

Reine Allix looked at him, and laid her hand on his bowed head, and her voice was strong and tender as music:

"Fret not thyself, my beloved. When the moment comes, then do as thine own heart and the whisper of God in it bid thee."

A great sob answered her: it was the first time A Leaf in the Storm.