Safe at last! Thank God! The family are able to look out to the
light of the sun again. They see the glittering stars of night
shine calmly down on the slaughter house, the charnel of "Paris
incendie." The silence is brooding. It seems unfamiliar after
months of siege, and battle's awful music.
In a few days the benumbed survivors crawl around the streets. Open
gates enable provisions to reach the half-famished dwellers within
the walls. Over patched bridges, the railways pour the longed-for
supplies into Paris. Fair France is fruitful, even in her year
of God's awful vengeance upon the rotten empire of "Napoleon the
Little."
Pere Francois lingers by the bedside of the suffering girl. She
moans and tosses in the fever of her wound. Her mind is wandering.
A slender, girlish arm wanders out of the coverlid often. She lies,
with flushed cheeks and eyes strangely bright.
Tenderly replacing the innocent's little hands under the counterpane,
Francois Ribaut starts with sudden surprise.
He fastens his gaze eagerly on the poor girl's left arm.
Can there be two scars like this?
The sign of the cross.
He is amazed. The little Spanish girl, from whose baby arm he
extracted a giant poisonous thorn, bore a mark like this,--a record
of his own surgery.
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