Notwithstanding her natural courage, Amélie took refuge in a heap of cables and clasped the child tightly to her breast. She did not wish to see or hear, but the shrieks of the skiff's inmates sounded on her ears even tho she covered them close.
She clasped the child tightly. Suddenly she I screamed aloud, for she felt the vessel beneath her tremble amid a deafening explosion. The child ceased sobbing through fright. The schooner's magazine had exploded, casting her into the air. The detonation was followed by a terrible silence while pieces of broken timber and mutilated bodies floated on the surface of the water.
Naundorff raised the almost inanimate form of his daughter from the deck, and then exclaimed in broken tones that seemed to presage naught but a hopeless future:
"Blood has been spilled for our cause; God is against us!"
[Book IV
PICMORT]
Chapter I
THE CASTLE
At the foot of a mountain-chain which crosses Brittany, continues through Normandy and terminates in Cherbourg, stands the castle of Picmort. It pertains to the de Brezé patrimony, through the Guyornarch fief, which was the avenue through which the illustrious family claimed descent from the royal house of Brittany. Notwithstanding political vicissitudes and the invasion of new ideas, the de Brezés continued to exercise a veritable sovereignty in that corner of France. There lived not in the valley a shepherd nor a long-haired peasant who failed to acknowledge the dominion of the House de Brezé and render the tribute of a reverence approaching divine honors. René during his hunting journeys to Picmort received proofs of the extraordinary attachment which the Bretons evinced to their master.