I set off with all speed, and when I arrived there was a Prussian patrol at the cottage; and when I asked what it all meant, I was told that there was a captain of francs-tireurs and his wife inside, both dead. I gave their names; they saw that I knew them, and I begged to be allowed to arrange their funeral. “Somebody has already undertaken it,” was the reply. “Go in if you wish to, as you know them. You can settle about their funeral with their friend.” I went in. The captain and his wife were lying side by side on a bed, and were covered by a sheet. I raised it, and saw that the woman had inflicted a similar wound in her throat to that from which her husband had died. At the side of the bed there sat, watching and weeping, the woman who had been mentioned to me as their best friend. It was the lancer's wife. THE PRISONERS There was not a sound in the forest save the indistinct, fluttering sound of the snow falling on the trees. It had been snowing since noon; a little fine snow, that covered the branches as with frozen moss, and spread a silvery covering over the dead leaves in the ditches, and covered the roads with a white, yielding carpet, and made still more intense the boundless silence of this ocean of trees. Before the door of the forester's dwelling a young woman, her arms bare to the elbow, was chopping wood with a hatchet on a block of stone. She was tall, slender, strong-a true girl of the woods, daughter and wife of a forester. A voice called from within the house: “We are alone to-night, Berthine; you must come in. It is getting dark, and there may be Prussians or wolves about.” “I've just finished, mother,” replied the young woman, splitting as she spoke an immense log of wood with strong, deft blows, which expanded her chest each time she raised her arms to strike. “Here I am; there's no need to be afraid; it's quite light still.” Then she gathered up her sticks and logs, piled them in the chimney corner, went back to close the great oaken shutters, and finally came in, drawing behind her the heavy bolts of the door. Her mother, a wrinkled old woman whom age had rendered timid, was spinning by the fireside. “I am uneasy,” she said, “when your father's not here. Two women are not much good.” “Oh,” said the younger woman, “I'd cheerfully kill a wolf or a Prussian if it came to that.” And she glanced at a heavy revolver hanging above the hearth. Her husband had been called upon to serve in the army at the beginning of the Prussian invasion, and the two women had remained alone with the old father, a keeper named Nicolas Pichon, sometimes called Long-legs, who refused obstinately to leave his home and take refuge in the town.