The house, having its back on the Rue de la Cité, at the point where that street joined the Tertasse, stood in the heart of the conflict; and almost from the moment of the first attack on the Porte Neuve, which Claude was in time to witness, was a centre of fierce and deadly fighting. Anne dared not leave her mother, who, strange to say, slept through the early alarms; and it was bowed on the edge of her mother's bed—that bed beside which she had tasted so much of happiness and so much of grief—that she passed, not knowing what the turning page might show, the first hour of anxiety and suspense.
The report of a shot shook her frame. A scream stabbed her like a knife. Lower and lower she thrust her face amid the bed-clothes, striving to shut out sound and knowledge; or, woman-like, she raised her pale, beseeching face that she might listen, that she might hope. If he fell would they tell her? And how he fell, and where? Or would they hold her strange to him? Would she never hear?
Suddenly her mother opened her eyes, lay a while listening, then slowly sat up and looked at her. Anne saw the awakening alarm in the dear face, that in some mysterious way recalled its youth; and she fancied that to her other troubles, the misery of one of the old paroxysms was going to be added. At such an hour, with such sounds of terror filling the night, with such a glare dancing on the ceiling the first attack had come on, years before. Then the alarm had been fictitious; to-night the calamity which the poor woman had imagined, was happening with every circumstance of peril and alarm.
But Madame Royaume's face, though anxious and serious, retained to an astonishing extent its sanity. Whether the strange dream which she had had earlier in the night had prepared her for the state of things to which she awoke, or the weeks and months which had elapsed since that old alarm of fire dropped in some inexplicable way from her—and as one shock had upset, another restored the balance of her mind—certain it is that Anne, watching her with a painful interest, found her sane. Nor did Madame Royaume's first words dispel the impression.
"They hold out?" she asked, grasping her daughter's hand and pressing it. "They hold out?"
"Yes, yes, they hold out," Anne answered, hoping to soothe her. And she patted the hand that clasped hers. "Have no fear, dear, all will go well."
"If they have faith and hold out," the aged woman replied, listening to the strange medley of sounds that rose to them.
"They will, they will," Anne faltered.
"But there is need of every one!"
"They are gone, dear," the girl answered, repressing a sob with difficulty. "We are alone in the house."