The absence of that one whom Bevill would fain have seen present in the church, his late custodian, the gallant De Violaine, was felt regretfully by him. Yet it was not to be. As the breach was made soon after the siege began, De Violaine, rushing from the roof to where the English grenadiers were pouring through it, received a thrust from one of the officers' swords. Later, as Bevill and Sylvia passed from the _salle d'armes_, they saw him lying in the covered way and being ministered to by one of the regimental surgeons. This sad sight produced in the tender heart of Radegonde de Valorme a feeling, a recollection of past years and of the fortitude with which this man had borne the blighting of the one great hope that had filled his heart during those years. As she saw him stretched now upon the coarse sacking on which he had been laid; as she recognised that, from first to last, he had had no companion but his duty to cheer his lonely life, her memory flew swiftly back to earlier days--the days when he, young, elated with the promise of his career, favoured by fortune, had craved only one other thing, a woman's--her own love--and had failed to obtain his heart's desire. Swiftly she advanced now towards him; a moment later she was kneeling by his side; still a moment later she was murmuring. "André! André! Ah! say this is not the end. Ah, no! it cannot, cannot be. You are still young--oh!" And she wept. "He may live," the surgeon who had been told off to watch by De Violaine's side said. "If the fever from his wound abates to-night he may do so." "I pray God," the Comtesse said, then whispered again to the wounded man, "André, I will not leave Liége until I see you restored. You shall be removed to Van Ryck's house. I alone will nurse you back to recovery." But De Violaine, understanding her words, murmured: "As well leave me. What matters now my life or death!" The impatience of La Rose grew greater as still the rider whom the wayward creature had loved to carry on her back, the rider for whom she had pined and fretted during their long separation, did not come. Yet soon, though she did not know it, that impatience would be at an end. Inside the old Dutch house the last partings were being made; the two who were going forth from it, never perhaps to cross its threshold again, were bidding farewell to those left behind. Even now Bevill was standing by the couch on which De Violaine lay through the long days, while from his lips fell the last words that he supposed he would ever utter to him whose prisoner he had been, to him who had been so humane a custodian.