"Where has she gone?" cried the blind man. "To freedom. My blessing follows her, unbeliever though she be." The ascetic moved forward, thin and stern, and made the sign of the cross over the fallen sentry. "Bless me also," cried Roussilac, catching at his skirt. "Father, I have done much evil. Bless me before you go." "I may pity where I may not bless," said St Agapit, and passed with that same dignified step which awed the Iroquois into silence when on a distant day they led him out to die. His shadow flickered once upon the slope, went out, and the governor was alone with the dead. The soldiers who had been left to execute their commander's unnatural order glanced fearfully at one another, and he who held the ring muttered a charm against the evil eye. That cry of impotent rage, which had caused Roussilac to stop his ears, fell from the lips of Madame Labroquerie so soon as her mind caught the meaning of her sentence; and when the men at length advanced to take her, she writhed and bit the air, and hurled after her nephew words of execration which caused the soldiers to draw back and cross themselves in terror. All the hate and madness of the unhappy woman's ruined mind poured forth in one awful torrent, until she sank to the floor and settled there to silence. Then the men took courage to seize her, believing that the blood which they saw issuing from her mouth was produced by the wounds which her own teeth had inflicted; but when the body fell limp in their arms they realised that nature had intervened. One at the head, the other at the feet, they carried through the night the silent shape of Madame Labroquerie, who was never to move, never to rave, again. Yet so blindly obedient to their officer's word of command were these men in the ranks, that they carried the body out and executed sentence upon it an hour after sunrise in the valley of St. Charles. At that same hour rumour went about the fortress--set in motion by a sentry, who had seen the governor rushing down to the forest during the night--to the effect that Roussilac was lying under a spell of witchcraft. This rumour became an established fact when the Abbé Laroche was seen proceeding from the church upon the hill with asperges brush and a shell of holy water. "Such is the end of ambition," murmured St Agapit, when they had brought him the evil tidings. "Can a clay body resist free spirits of the dead?" CHAPTER XXIX. WOMAN'S LOVE IS LIFE. Before we leave the fortress, to return thither no more, a glance must be taken at Madeleine, evading the power of the Church and the secular arm, escaping from the mother who had grown to hate her and the cousin who had not courage to shield her. Her rescuer was not a man--if it be true that man was made in the image of God--yet his actions upon that night went far to prove that he owned a human heart.