“What’s the fellow singing? Get along, do!” shouted voices; and one of the soldiers, evidently afraid Pierre might take it into his head to snatch the silver and bronzes from them, pounced on him in a menacing fashion.

“A child?” shouted a Frenchman from above. “I did hear something crying in the garden. Perhaps it’s the fellow’s brat. Must be humane you know.”

“Where is it?” asked Pierre.

“This way!” the French soldier shouted to him from the window pointing to the garden behind the house. “Wait, I’ll come down.”

And in a minute the Frenchman, a black-eyed fellow, with a patch on his cheek, in his shirt-sleeves, did in fact jump out of a window on the ground floor, and slapping Pierre on the shoulder, he ran with him to the garden. “Make haste, you fellows,” he shouted to his comrades, “it’s beginning to get hot.” Running behind the house to a sanded path, the Frenchman pulled Pierre by the arm, and pointed out to him a circular space. Under a garden seat lay a girl of three years old, in a pink frock.

“Here’s your brat. Ah, a little girl. So much the better,” said the Frenchman. “Good-bye. Must be humane, we are all mortal, you know”; and the Frenchman, with the patch on his cheek, ran back to his comrades.

Pierre, breathless with joy, ran up to the child, and would have taken her in his arms. But seeing a stranger, the little girl—a scrofulous-looking, unattractive child very like her mother—screamed and ran away. Pierre caught her, however, and lifted her up in his arms; she squealed in desperate fury, and tried to tear herself out of Pierre’s arms with her little hands, and to bite him with her dirty, dribbling mouth. Pierre had a sense of horror and disgust, such as he had felt at contact with some little beast. But he made an effort to overcome it, and not to drop the child, and ran with it back to the big house. By now, however, it was impossible to get back by the same way; the servant-girl, Aniska, was nowhere to be seen, and with a feeling of pity and loathing, Pierre held close to him, as tenderly as he could, the piteously howling, and sopping wet baby, and ran across the garden to seek some other way out.