"Jan Meert's way," answered Martin, and drew back the kirtle. "It was like this," he went on slowly. His hand still rested on the brown stain, and his face, like my own, was bent over that of the dead woman between us. "Even in the copse she heard the noise of the devil's work going on, and it drew her home, for love of Solignac it drew her home. She came back, that was her duty, being alone." He stopped, and his hand slipped up to the face. He had never loved Babette; chiefly, I think, because of her love for me: but now, with a strange tenderness he smoothed the wrinkles of her withered face, and I knew it was his repentant amends for many a hard word and harder thought. She had loved Solignac, she had died for love of Solignac, and if there had been strife between them it was forgiven for the sake of that love and death. "I could not," he went on, half to himself and half, it seemed, in humble, apologetic explanation to her. "I was not alone, and so I could not come back. Monsieur Gaspard came first. Thou understandest, dost thou not, thou quiet one, that Monsieur Gaspard is always first? She came back," he resumed, looking again up at me and speaking briskly, "came back raging! My faith! don't I know the mood well! She found Jan Meert and his crew busy and she let loose her tongue. Solignac has failed in wit now and then, but it never bred cowards even in its women. Rats fight when cornered, and Babette was no rat. She fought with what weapon she had, and it cannot hurt her now to say she was bitter-tongued beyond all reason. Another man would have let her rail, but not Jan Meert. That was never Jan Meert's way; he answered her back, and there's his answer!" "It was a foolish thing, that coming back," said I, my brain in such a whirl from the conflict within; rage, grief, resentment, hate, warring to so confused a tumult that I hardly knew what I said. "Is love foolish? Is duty foolish?" "What could one, and that one a woman, what could she do?" I answered sourly. It was not that I did not love old Babette, it was not that I did not mourn for her, but realization was as yet far from me. Martin made no reply, but the reproach in his eyes smote me. Down I went on my knees, my palms on either side the withered face. "Old friend, old friend, how can I pay thee? How? How?" "Look in her face for the answer and then look here," he said harshly, "Pay Jan Meert. Love takes no payment for love. Pay Jan Meert." From the hard passionless face of the dead I looked up to the hard passionate face of the living, and laid my hand on the wound Jan Meert had made. "By God! I will!" As if there was no more to be said Martin rose briskly to his feet. Babette had done Hellewyl of Solignac a last service and one, in his opinion, worth dying for. "That settles it, and hey! for Ghent," he cried gaily, as if there were no such thing as ruin or sack or death in the world, and stooping, lifted her once more in his arms.