“Poor little Fifi, I shall have to leave him. Jean will be good to him I hope.” She turned away sadly as a realizing sense of what she must forsake came over her.
It was a long, weary day for the girl, who occupied herself feverishly in such ways as would seem most usual to the servants. “Never again will I see my home,” she said over and over again. Over an unknown way to an unknown land, the thought would now and again terrify her, but her heart leaped as she thought of her father, and more than once Michelle heard her clear young voice singing an old madrigal. “Child of the good heart,” she would sigh, “she little knows of what is before her. It is but the strange journey to a strange land of which she thinks, the poor little one.”
The house was very still when Alaine crept from her room and presented herself before the door of Michelle’s chamber. The housekeeper’s room was not far from her own, for Michelle was something more than servant and scarcely less than one of the family. “Are you ready, Michelle?” came Alaine’s whisper.
The door opened cautiously and she went in. “Can I help you?” she asked. “We are to be comrades from now henceforth, Michelle; let us not stand upon ceremony,” she added, sweetly, as she saw her companion hesitated to ask a service.
“If you will help me, dear child, to roll my Bible into my hair. I must carry it so lest it be discovered. It will not show?”
“Not at all.” Alaine viewed the arrangement critically. “What have I to do?”
“First I must crop your abundance of brown locks. A boy has not such a crop of hair.” And she relentlessly clipped the shining tresses, which slipped to the ground in soft coils. Alaine laughed to see herself, at last, clad in the blouse of a peasant lad, a cap set upon her short curls, her slender hands stained and even scratched. “They will then look more in keeping with my character,” the girl said, gayly.
Then out into the night they slipped; Michelle with basket on arm, Alaine with one hand inside her blouse clasping tightly the small Beza psalm-book; from henceforth it would mean more than a family relic. One last look at the gray walls of her home looming up darkly against the starry sky, and Alaine whispered, “Forever! forever!” then she followed Michelle down the dusty road to where Rouen lay sleeping by the river Seine.
The streets of the city when the fugitives reached it were full of armed men, who rode about the town changing place as soon as they had compelled those upon whom they were quartered to sign their act of conformation. They seemed to be everywhere, and Alaine shrank closer to Michelle as she noted the haughty, overbearing look of the soldiers. “Be of good heart, little one,” Michelle whispered. “Remember you are no longer Alaine Hervieu, but Jacques Assire, my son, and we live in the direction of Dieppe; we return to our home when we have sold our eggs. Name of Grace! but one sees a woebegone set of countenances here; it is pitiful indeed. We have escaped none too soon; the dragonnades are in full force, as you see, and if we would not be witnesses to worse sights than the driving forth of women and children into the streets we will not tarry long. It is early yet, but none too early for our purpose.”
And, indeed, Michelle had hardly exchanged her eggs for some of the homely commodities which a peasant might be supposed to buy, when issuing from a shop across the narrow street Alaine caught sight of her cousin Étienne. “Michelle, Michelle, do not look; my cousin is there on the other side,” the girl said, in a shrill whisper.