Bishop Anianus did not forget mercy even in this moment of rescue and triumph. Many a fallen foe among the Huns was saved by his intercession, even in the city they had so nearly brought to destruction. Baithene came eagerly into the Jew’s lodging to share the joy of deliverance with Ethne; but to his dismay she was not there. It was some little time before he found her in one of the streets, kneeling beside a dying boy left behind by the Huns, leaning the poor ugly brown head on her knee, moistening the parched lips with water, chafing the cold, quivering hands. “Brother,” she said softly, “it might have been thee!” The death-pallor was on the lips, and soon the quivering limbs lay rigid on the ground beside them. Then, looking up, the two saw a young Roman on horseback, with his eyes fixed on them. He had been watching Ethne for some minutes in silence. Ethne, raising her eyes to his, said, “Bishop Anianus told us to do what we could even for a wounded enemy.” There was a glow of sympathy in his face as he replied— “Pardon me, lady! I was thinking it was just what my own mother and sister in Rome would have done.” And with a gesture of reverence he rode on. But that night in his dreams there came to Marius a vision of the fair kind face of the maiden with the soft dark-grey eyes, and the poor brown head of the dying Hun on her knee. Could it have been a dim, prophetic vision of another siege of Orleans, and another Maid of Orleans, seeing a wounded Englishman dying by the roadside, alighting from her horse, and, like a tender sister, holding his head on her knee to the last? Or was it only the remembrance stamped into his heart of the young Irish maiden? [Illustration] [Illustration] CHAPTER X. TROYES—HER SAINT AND HER SALVATION. The siege of Orleans was raised. But it was some time before any feeling of security could be restored to the city; before the rescued citizens could feel sure that the flying squadrons of the nimble Tartar horsemen were not merely wheeling away in some of their bewildering manœuvres, to dash back with redoubled force against the walls. All that night, therefore, there was anxious watching kept from rampart and tower. Between the almost incredible joy of rescue, and the moans of the wounded and dying, there was little sleep in Orleans that night. Baithene kept guard near one of the breaches of the shattered walls, and gradually the silence of the deserted fields, so lately the camping-ground of a nation, flowed over him with a sense of deliverance and peace. For some time there was a distant sound of the multitudinous movements of a retreating host; but the sounds were like those of an ebbing tide, growing fainter and fainter and more broken, till they died away altogether, and he felt that the foe was really gone.