because of the scarcity of nourishment; already the iron of war had
entered their souls.

The little street at evening was mournful and very silent; the few who
talked spoke in whispers, lest a spy should hear them, and the young
ones had no strength to play--they wanted food.

"It is as it was in my youth," said Reine Allix, eating her piece of
black bread and putting aside the better food prepared for her, that she
might save it, unseen, for the "child."

It was horrible to her and to all of them to live in that continual
terror of an unknown foe, that perpetual expectation of some ghastly,
shapeless misery. They were quiet,--so quiet!--but by all they heard
they knew that any night, as they went to their beds, the thunder of
cannon might awaken them; any morning, as they looked on their beloved
fields, they knew that ere sunset the flames of war might have devoured
them. They knew so little too; all they were told was so indefinite
and garbled that sometimes they thought the whole was some horrid
dream--thought so, at least, until they looked at their empty stables,
their untilled land, their children who cried from hunger, their mothers
who wept for the conscripts.

But as yet it was not so very much worse than it had been in times of
bad harvest and of dire distress; and the storm which raged over the
land had as yet spared this little green nest among the woods on the
Seine.

November came. "It is a cold night, Bernadou; put on some more wood,"
said Reine Allix. Fuel at the least was plentiful in that district, and