Though the boy was dressed like a plain French citizen of that year,
1795, and his knee breeches betrayed shrunken calves, and his sleeves,
wrists that were swollen as with tumors, Eagle accepted him as her
equal. His fine wavy hair was of a chestnut color, and his hands and
feet were small. His features were perfect as her own. But while life
played unceasingly in vivid expression across her face, his muscles
never moved. The hazel eyes, bluish around their iris rims, took
cognizance of nothing. His left eyebrow had been parted by a cut now
healed and forming its permanent scar.

"You understand me, don't you?" Eagle talked to him. "But you could not
understand Sally Blake. She is an English girl. We live at her house
until our ship sails, and I hope it will sail soon. Poor boy! Did the
wicked mob in Paris hurt your arms?"

She soothed and patted his wrists, and he neither shrank in pain nor
resented the endearment with male shyness.

Eagle edged closer to him on the stone pavement. She was amused by the
blacksmith's arch, and interested in all the unusual life around her,
and she leaned forward to find some response in his eyes. He was
unconscious of his strange environment. The ancient church of St.
Bartholomew the Great, or St. Bat's as it was called, in the heart of
London, had long been a hived village. Not only were houses clustered
thickly around its outside walls and the space of ground named its
close; but the inside, degraded from its first use, was parceled out to
owners and householders. The nave only had been retained as a church
bounded by massive pillars, which did not prevent Londoners from using
it as a thoroughfare. Children of resident dissenters could and did hoot
when it pleased them, during service, from an overhanging window in the