Banks, museums, and palaces have been despoiled. Boys and old crones trade costly jewels in the streets for bread and rum. The firing parties are sick of carnage. Killing in cold blood ceases now, from sheer mechanical fatigue. On the twenty-eighth, a loud knocking on the door of the house brings Aristide Dauvray to the door. A brief parley. The obstructions are cleared. Raoul is clasped in his father's arms. Safe at last. Grim, bloody, powder-stained, with tattered clothes, he is yet unwounded. A steady sergeant and half-dozen men are quickly posted as a guard. They can breathe once more. This help is sadly needed. In a darkened room above, little Louise Moreau lies in pain and silence. Grave-faced PŠre Fran‡ois is the skilful nurse and physician. A shell fragment, bursting through a window, has torn her tender, childish body. Raoul rapidly makes Armand and his father known to the nearest "poste de garde." He obtains protection for them. His own troops are ordered to escort drafts of the swarming prisoners to the Orangery at Versailles. Already several thousands of men, women, and children, of all grades, are penned within the storied walls. Here the princesses of France sported, before that other great blood frenzy, the Revolution, seized on the Parisians. With a brief rest, he tears himself away from a mother's arms, and departs for the closing duties of the second siege of Paris. The drawing in of the human prey completes the work. Safe at last! Thank God! The family are able to look out to the light of the sun again. They see the glittering stars of night shine calmly down on the slaughter house, the charnel of "Paris incendie." The silence is brooding. It seems unfamiliar after months of siege, and battle's awful music. In a few days the benumbed survivors crawl around the streets. Open gates enable provisions to reach the half-famished dwellers within the walls. Over patched bridges, the railways pour the longed-for supplies into Paris. Fair France is fruitful, even in her year of God's awful vengeance upon the rotten empire of "Napoleon the Little." PŠre Fran‡ois lingers by the bedside of the suffering girl. She moans and tosses in the fever of her wound. Her mind is wandering. A slender, girlish arm wanders out of the coverlid often. She lies, with flushed cheeks and eyes strangely bright. Tenderly replacing the innocent's little hands under the counterpane, Fran‡ois Ribaut starts with sudden surprise. He fastens his gaze eagerly on the poor girl's left arm. Can there be two scars like this? The sign of the cross. He is amazed. The little Spanish girl, from whose baby arm he extracted a giant poisonous thorn, bore a mark like this,--a record of his own surgery. At far Lagunitas, he had said, playfully to Dolores Valois: "Your little one will never forget the cross; she will bear it forever." For the incision left a deep mark on baby Isabel Valois' arm.