"My lady will have his neck, wrung," threatened Zélie.
"She dare not. The chimney will tumble in. The fort will be taken."
"Art thou working against us?" demanded the maid wrathfully.
"Why should I work for you? You should, indeed, work for me. Pick me up this swan and carry him to the top of the stairs."
"I will not do it!" cried Zélie, revolting through every atom of her ample bulk. "Do I want to be lifted over the turret like thistledown?"
The dwarf laughed, and caught her swan by the back of his neck. With webbed toes and beating wings he fought every step; but she pulled herself up by the balustrade and dragged him along. His bristling plumage scraped the upper floor until he and his wrath were shut within the dwarf's chamber.
"Naught but muscle and bone and fire and flax went to the making of that stunted wight," mused Zélie, setting her knuckles in her hips. "What a pity that she escapes powder and ball, when poor Pierre Doucett is shot down!—a man with wife and child, and useful to my lady besides."
It was easy for Claude La Tour's widow to fill her idleness with visions of political alliance, but when D'Aulnay de Charnisay began to batter the walls round her ears, her common sense resumed sway. She could be of no use outside her apartment, so she took her meals there, trembling, but in her fashion resolute and courageous. The crash of cannon-shot was forever associated with her first reception in Acadia. Therefore this siege was a torture to her memory as well as a peril to her body. The tower had no more sheltered place, however, than Lady Dorinda's room. Zélie had orders to wait upon her with strict attention. The cannonading dying away as darkness lifted its wall between the opposed forces, she hoped for such sleep as could be had in a besieged place, and waited Zélie's knock. War, like a deluge, may drive people who detest each other into endurable contact; and when, without even a warning stroke on the panel, Le Rossignol slipped in as nimbly as a spider, Lady Dorinda felt no such indignation as she would have felt in ordinary times.
"May I sit by your fire, your highness?" sweetly asked the dwarf. Lady Dorinda held out a finger to indicate the chimney-side and to stay further progress. The sallow and corpulent woman gazed at the beak-faced atom.
"It hath been repeated a thousand times, but I will say again I am no highness."