"Mon pauvre gars!" murmured La Vireville, bending over him. "I am afraid you have your marching orders, whatever the surgeon may say." * * * * * How had Le Goffic been got here--how had any of them come alive out of that place, where the sand was pitted with grapeshot like dust after a thunderstorm? He could hardly tell even now. Long after the order to retire should have come, the régiment d'Hector and the little Chouan contingent, both fearfully reduced, had gone on stoically firing and falling. . . . La Vireville had heard since that d'Hervilly, the author of the disaster, had given the word for retirement earlier, but that aide-de-camp after aide-de-camp to whom it was entrusted had been shot down, and then d'Hervilly himself received his own mortal wound. And when at last the order reached them, the régiment d'Hector, whose losses had already been so great, was obliged to sacrifice its company of cadets, boys of fifteen and sixteen, before the manœuvre could be carried out. Well, somehow they had got out of the slaughter. And, afterwards, the cost of failure was counted--du Dresnay (René's regiment) fearfully cut up, its lieutenant-colonel in command killed; Hector--so valuable a corps by reason of the experienced naval officers which it contained--reduced to half its effectives; and in Loyal-Emigrant, out of a hundred and twenty veteran chevaliers de St. Louis, only forty-five returned from the attack. Other regiments had been less exposed--but all had suffered. . . . La Vireville, still kneeling by Le Goffic, passed his hand over his eyes as though to wipe away a vision. Seasoned as he was, the past twelve hours had provided him with rather more in the way of sensation than he could stomach. St. Four was dead. He himself had promised, in certain circumstances, to be responsible for Anne-Hilarion. Lastly, irretrievable disaster was moving swiftly upon them. There was only Fort Penthièvre, as René had said, between them and Hoche's advance. And, suddenly, a couple of snatches of Anne-Hilarion's favourite ballad floated up to Fortuné's brain from the region where, all unconsciously, he must have stored them that afternoon when he had heard it from the child's lips in the cave by Kerdronan. The first related to some man, whose name did not revisit him, lying drowned, fifty fathoms down, 'with the Scots lords at his feet.' The second brought with it the same picture which it had conjured up for him then--of the fisherman's young wife waiting in vain, in her cottage on the shore, for the husband who had been sacrificed, really, on the same altar as to-day's victims--and to-morrow's. "O lang, lang may the maidens sit Wi' their gowd kames in their hair, A-waiting for their ain dear loves! For them they'll see nae mair." He cast a last look at Le Goffic, and, going to the door of the shed, went forth into the sunshine and the suffering outside.