One stout clasped notebook had suffered little. He thrust it into his pocket and turned to Juliette. She said, with a rueful catch of the breath as she regarded the wreckage of her own property:
"Me they have not left anything at all of luggage. The little portemanteau and the sac de nuit I brought with me from Belgium ... behold their contents destroyed by those most wicked men! Is it not deplorable? Pray look, Monsieur!"
But Monsieur, suddenly seized by an attack of ultra-British prudery, had turned away to rummage in the corner of a cupboard, where perchance might lurk a loaf.
Nothing was there but a little knitted white shawl, which Juliette recognized as her own, and claimed gladly.... She threw it about her head and shoulders, and they passed out cautiously together by Madame Guyot's back door, as destitute a young couple as ever tramped. But not before Juliette de Bayard had replaced the sheet over the face of the dead gunner, and sprinkled it with holy water from a crockery stoup that hung above the bed.
"He was so good.... He should now be safe in Paradise. But we must always remember him in our prayers!..."
It would not have been wise to move about, but they could talk in whispers, partly buried in the heap of clean dry dead leaves filling half of the lean-to. Thus P. C. Breagh learned the story of the death of my Cousin Boisset, and told in return his own tale.
"You had departed, it might be one-half hour, when a man came running down the street, who cried: 'Hide! Run! The Uhlans are coming! They have plundered the Château Malakoff, and drunk M. Bénoit's eau de vie and wine!'
"This Château Malakoff is the house of a rich peasant whose vineyards have suffered much by the German guns. You will remember Madame Guyot saying so, and M. Boisset responding, full of gaiety, 'He will get all the better prices, my cousin, for the old vintages he has in store!' Naturally the outcry made much confusion, one peasant running this way and one that.... Madame Guyot caught hold of me and would have forced me to accompany her, saying that in the quarries beyond the village would be found a refuge. But I refused to leave the house!"
He broke in:
"Think what you risked! Why didn't you escape with her?"