"Will you promise me, then, to do your utmost, if the worst happens, to save yourself, for Anne's sake, if not for your own? Will you promise me that, Fortuné?" La Vireville looked him in the eyes and gripped the hand he held. "Yes, I promise you that, René. So it be not inconsistent with honour, I will do my best to save myself--and if you are killed, and I live to return, Anne shall be my . . . son." * * * * * But how far off, how incongruous, in the midst of this welter of blood and catastrophe, was the thought of that little boy, with his confiding ways! Outside his own quarters at St. Pierre, Fortuné met the surgeon who was attending to the Chouan wounded, and, going in with him, displaced Grain d'Orge, who, looking like a necromancer, was giving attentions of very doubtful value to the moaning Le Goffic on his heap of seaweed. "Monsieur Augustin," whispered the self-constituted leech, while the surgeon examined the young Breton, "this is not a good place, this Quiberon!" "Your remark is very just, mon vieux!" returned La Vireville, half sadly, half humorously. "You are not the first to make it, either. Do you want to go back to the Côtes-du-Nord? There is the devil of a deal of fighting before you if you wish to do that." "Ma Doué, I am sure of it!" said Grain d'Orge with a chuckle. He rubbed off some blood, presumably Le Goffic's, from his hands on to his baggy breeches. "You and I, Monsieur Augustin, have seen much of that--and of this too," he added, laying a grimy finger on La Vireville's wounded arm. "And I know that _I_ shall see my parish again, because the wise woman told me so before I left. But not many of the others, perhaps." A sudden compunction invaded La Vireville. It was his influence which had led these children of Northern Brittany away from their homes to perish in what was, to them, almost a foreign land. "Listen to me, mon gars," he said. "If ever I give the word for a sauve qui peut, for disbandment, in short, remember it is because I am convinced that each man, separately, has a better chance for his life than with the rest. If you gained the mainland, it would be difficult to distinguish any of you from the inhabitants there, to prove, indeed, that you had ever been in Quiberon at all." Grain d'Orge's little eyes twinkled. "That is very true, Monsieur Augustin. I will remember." And La Vireville, as he bent down to hear what the surgeon thought of Le Goffic, had a conviction that the wise woman had not been wrong about Grain d'Orge, who, of incorruptible fidelity though he was, had too much innate cunning not to succeed in saving his own skin. "I think he will do," said the surgeon, and gave directions. "The rest--ah, but what have you there yourself, Monsieur? We will have your coat off at once, if you please!" "I am not made of porcelain," protested La Vireville. "I know what it is--a flesh wound merely. I want my men all seen to first."