She left the keyboard, came and dropped on her knees beside him; and closing her eyes to check the tears sang in a low, tremulous, girlish voice, De Lonlay’s words, to the battle anthem of revolution. "Bully," he sighed. And spoke no more on earth. But the little mistress of the bells did not know his soul had passed. And the French officer who came leaping up the stairs, pistol lifted, halted in astonishment to see a dead man lying beside a sack of bombs and a young girl on her knees beside him, weeping and tremblingly intoning "La Brabançonne." CHAPTER XXI THE GARDENER A week later, toward noon, as usual, the two American, muleteers, Smith and Glenn, sauntered over from their corral to the White Doe Tavern where, it being a meatless day, they ate largely of potato soup and of a tench, smoking hot. The tench had been caught that morning off the back doorstep, which was an ancient and mossy slab of limestone let into the coping of the river wall. Jean Courtray, the crippled inn-keeper, caught it. All that morning he had sat there in the sun on the river wall, half dozing, opening his dim eyes at intervals to gaze at his painted quill afloat among the water weeds of the little river Lesse. At intervals, too, he turned his head with that peculiar movement of the old, and peered at his daughter, Maryette, and the Belgian gardener who were working among the potatoes in the garden. And at last he had hooked his fish and the emaciated young Belgian dropped his hoe and came over and released it from the hook where it lay flopping and quivering and glittering among the wild grasses on the river bank. And that was how Kid Glenn and Sticky Smith, American muleteers on duty at Saint Lesse, came to lunch on freshly caught tench at the Inn of the White Doe. After luncheon, agreeably satiated, they rose from the table in the little dining room and strolled out to the garden in the rear of the inn, their Mexican spurs clanking. Maryette heard them; they tipped their caps to her; she acknowledged their salute gravely and continued to cultivate her garden with a hoe, the blond, consumptive Belgian trundling a rickety cultivator at her heels. "Look, Stick," drawled Glenn. "Maryette’s got her decoration on." From where they lounged by the river wall they could see the cross of the Legion pinned to the girl’s blouse. Both muleteers had been present at the investment the day before, when a general officer arrived from Paris and the entire garrison of Sainte Lesse had been paraded--an impressive total of three dozen men--six gendarmes and a brigadier; one remount sub-lieutenant and twenty troopers; a veterinary, two white American muleteers, and five American negro hostlers from Baton Rouge.