"`How should I know?' she said. `And what does it matter? You're no aristocrat--why should you care? Stay! I heard tell--what was it then? They let the little lady go--that was it, I think. A nice little lady too, if she hadn't been one of the cursed breed. Many's the silver piece she's given me as she passed. What was she to you that you should look so, boy? Foster-sister, may be?' "Pierre nodded. He could not speak. "`They let her go--or she wasn't to be found. That was it. You'll find _her_ may be. They said Marguerite had a hand in it--do you know Marguerite? She lives with the Citizeness. Nay, I forget her name, but you may hear of her at the wine-shop at the corner of the Rue de Poitiers. She can tell you more than I, if she will,' and with these words the old woman hurried off more quickly than one could have thought she could move, and drew to the door sharply, in Pierre's face. "He walked slowly down the street, stunned and dazed by what he had heard. He had known it might be so; he had heard plenty of the horrors taking place in this very Paris where he stood. But it had not come home to him till now, and he felt as if he could not believe it. Even to think of the Marquis and his wife coming to such an end--people he had known, whose faces he could remember--made him shiver; but for his own ladies! No, he could not believe it. `No one--not the hardest-hearted--could look in the Countess's face and not see how gentle and good she was! And Mademoiselle Edmee, if it were true that they had taken her mother, she would have died of grief. No--I shall hope still!' he said." CHAPTER TEN. "Pierre had wandered down the whole length of the Rue de Lille before he quite came to himself, and then he started to see how far he had come. He had crossed two or three side streets without noticing their names. "`I may have passed the Rue de Poitiers,' he said to himself, `where she said the wine-shop was,' and he looked about him anxiously. A few steps further brought him out of the quiet Rue de Lille into a wider thoroughfare, the noise of which had already begun to reach him. Here there was life and movement enough--of a kind. Groups stood about talking, noisily laughing; some few passers-by, looking more serious, as if on their way to or from their daily work, were stopped and jeered at, and in some cases seemed to have difficulty in getting away. "`Stay five minutes--they are coming this way--hark! you can hear them already,' Pierre heard said in a group of blouses to one of their fellows, who evidently wanted to get off. "`My wife's ill,' he said, `and the noise frightens her when she hears them pass. Let me go, good friends; I would stay, and gladly, but for that.'