Jack bent and touched the child's forehead with his lips.
"Pray for him," he said; "I shall write his wife to-night."
Alixe went in to the bedside to kneel again and buy back two souls with the agony of her child's heart.
"Pray," she said to Sir Thorald.
"Pray," he repeated.
Jack closed the door.
Up and down the dark hall he wandered, pausing at times to listen to some far rifle-shot and the answering fusillade along the picket-line. Once he stopped an officer on the stairway and asked for a priest, but, remembering that Sir Thorald was Protestant, turned away with a vague apology and resumed his objectless wandering.
At times he fancied he heard cannon, so far away that nothing of sound remained, only a faint jar on the night air. Twice he looked from the window over the vast black forest, thinking of the dead man lying there alone. And then he longed to go to Lorraine; he felt that he must touch her, that his hand on hers might help her somehow.
At last, deadly weary, he sat down on the stairs by her door to try to think out the problems that to-morrow would bring.
His aunt and uncle had gone on to Paris; Lorraine's father was dead and her home had been turned into a fort. Saint-Lys was heavily occupied by the Germans, and they held the railroad also in their possession. It seemed out of the question to stay in Morteyn with Lorraine, for an assault on the Château was imminent. How could he get her to Paris? That was the only place for her now.