Here in St. Gildas were massed all ages and ranks, veterans and boys, officers and private soldiers alike, and the wounded, of whom there were not a few, lay in their rain-soaked clothes on the stone floor with no care but what their empty-handed companions could give them. Here was Gesril du Papeu, the brine scarcely dry in his hair, who had swum back again from safety to share the fate of his comrades; and Charles de Lamoignon, who had carried his wounded younger brother to a boat, himself forbearing to embark; and men with names like Salignac-Fénelon and Broglie, and the seventeen-year-old Louis de Talhouët, who had passed, a prisoner, through the estates of his own family on the way to Auray; and many another. . . . * * * * * Somewhere between three and four in the morning an émigré named de Manny, whom La Vireville had known some years previously, came past, and, finding a little vacant space by the Chouan leader, sat down, and recalled himself to his memory. "You have been in Holland since then?" inquired Fortuné, looking at the faded sky-blue uniform with its orange cuffs. The fact was equally proclaimed by the black cockade which marked him as one of the second--Sombreuil's--contingent. "Yes; I was--and am--in the Légion de Béon, and had the luck to escape when the Republicans massacred eighty of us as we marched out at the surrender of Bois-le-Duc. This time----" he shrugged his shoulders. "We surrendered on terms, even if the capitulation was only verbal," said La Vireville, without much conviction. "There are plenty of witnesses to that." "Yes," retorted de Manny; "and what are the chances of the capitulation being observed?" La Vireville said nothing. "There is one man who will not escape in any case," went on the lieutenant of Béon, looking towards the tombstone a little way off where Sombreuil sat talking to some of his officers. "He is exempt from the capitulation--he exempted himself. And do you know, La Vireville, that he was summoned by the English Admiralty to Portsmouth, to take command of us of the black cockade, on the very eve of his wedding day? The summons came at midnight, and he obeyed it instantly; but he was to have been married on the morrow to a lady whom he adored." La Vireville made a sudden movement, as if his posture irked him. "How very dramatic!" he observed drily. "Was the lady sorry or relieved, I wonder?" De Manny looked at him, astonished at the tone, but the speaker's face was now in shadow from a neighbouring pillar. "I understand that she was heart-broken--that they both were. But what makes you ask such a question? Have you anything against M. de Sombreuil?" "Nothing whatever," replied the Chouan, shifting his wounded arm to a more comfortable position. "I pity him from the bottom of my heart. But the lady will marry someone else, you may be sure."