Lebertre pressed the hand of his agitated companion, and pointed up at the Christ, whilst an expression of faith and devotion brightened his own countenance. He designed to lead the thoughts of Lindet to the great Exemplar of patient suffering, but the curé of S. Cross mistook his meaning. He stood as one transfixed, before the tall gaunt crucifix, looking up at the illumined figure. Then, extending his arms, he cried, ‘Oh Jesus Christ! truly Thou wast martyred by the bishops and aristocrats of Thy day; smitten, insulted, condemned to death by Annas and Caiaphas, the high priests, and by Pilate, the imperial governor. Verily, Thy body the Church bleeds at the present day, sentenced and tortured by their successors in Church and State.’ Before the words had escaped his lips, a cry, piercing and full of agony, thrilled through the forest. Lindet and Lebertre held their breath. In another instant, from a footpath over which the bushes closed, burst a peasant girl, parting the branches, and darting to the crucifix, she flung herself before it, clasping her arms around the trunk, and in so doing overturning a flower-basket on her arm, and strewing the pedestal and kneeling-bench with bunches of roses. She was followed closely by a large man, richly dressed, who sprang towards her, cast his arms round her waist, and attempted to drag her from her hold. ‘Sacré! you sweet little wench. If persuasion and flattery fail, why, force must succeed.’ And he wrenched one of her bare brown arms from the cross. She cast a despairing look upward at the thorn-crowned head which bowed over her and the seducer, and uttered another piteous wail for help. At the same moment, the sun passed behind some bars of fog on the horizon, and the light it flung changed instantly from yellow to blood-red. The figure of the Christ was a miserable work of art, of the offensive style prevalent at the period, contorted with pain, the face drawn, and studded with huge clots of blood. In the scarlet light it shone down on those below as though it were carved out of flame, and menaced wrathfully. The girl still clung to the cross with one arm. She was dressed in a short blue woollen skirt that left unimpeded her ankles and feet, a black bodice laced in front, exposing the coarse linen sleeves and shift gathered over the bosom about the throat. Her white frilled Normandy cap, with its broad flaps, was disturbed, and some locks of raven hair fell from beneath it over her slender polished neck. The oval sun-browned face was exquisitely beautiful. The large dark eyes were distended with terror, and the lips were parted. ‘Mon Dieu! do you think that those frail arms can battle with mine?’ asked the pursuer with mocking composure, as he drew the other arm from the stem of the cross, and holding both at the wrists, pressed them back at the girl’s side so as to force her to face him.