"O, he died,--and so shockingly! It is more than two years ago now; but nurse is as grieved as ever when anything puts her in mind of it. It was so dreadful for the first few days,--before it was known exactly what had become of him! Nurse would not believe he was dead; and she was always saying that the smugglers had carried him out to sea, and sold him for a sailor, like somebody she once heard about. She was sure he would come back one day, either a rich India merchant, or begging at the door,--or somehow. And then, when the next letter came----" "Did it tell? Was he dead?" "O yes. Papa would not let us tell Maria, for fear of its making her afraid to go to bed; and I believe he did not mean us elder ones to know; but nurse set us to ask my brother Robert; for she never believed that papa had told her everything. Do you know, when they had shot him dead, they put his body into a cavern in the cliff, on the top of a flight of steps, and sitting up so that he looked as if he was alive, the first moment they found him." "But O, what do you think put it into their heads to look for him there?" interrupted Lucy. "They saw two cliff-ravens fly out when somebody went near the cavern; and then they knew that there must be a body there." Lucy stopped short at a sign from her sister, who thought the rest of the story too horrible to be told. Since Adèle could not make out by any mode of cross-questioning, what these further particulars were, she wanted next to know what caused Nicholas to be murdered. Her sister explained to her, with so much feeling, the nature of the service on which he had been engaged, and showed so much concern at his fate, that Lucy said, half to herself, and looking wistfully at Mademoiselle Gaubion, "I shall tell nurse how sorry you are." "Tell her, if it can comfort her to have the sympathy of a stranger." "A stranger,--a foreigner," repeated Lucy, still half to herself. "I said a stranger, not a foreigner," replied Mademoiselle, smiling. "As long as it is a stranger who sympathizes, what matters it whether she be native or foreign?" "Nurse thinks," replied Charlotte, "that French people are not sorry when any harm comes to those who try to prevent their smuggling. She was saying this morning----" Another sign from Charlotte. "Tell me what she said," replied Mademoiselle, smiling in a way which emboldened Lucy to proceed. "She said she did not want to have anybody in the neighbourhood that had helped to murder her son; and that every French person had helped to murder him, because it was the trying to get in French goods that made all the mischief." "Nurse does not know, perhaps, that the French suffer no less than the English in this kind of struggle. Frenchmen are sometimes thrown overboard into the sea, or shot on the shore. Frenchmen run the risk of losing their goods; and in such a contention, I am afraid it sometimes happens that a Frenchman hates an Englishman."