She smacked them and kicked them gently, and brought them quickly back to the caravan into which they climbed. There, sitting on the stool, she took their two heads, pressed them against her face, and kissed them tenderly.

"No ill feeling, children. Danger? I'll find Saint-Quentin in half an hour from now."

"A nice business!... Saint-Quentin!... A beggar who isn't sixteen!"

"While Castor and Pollux are twenty--taken together!" retorted Dorothy.

"But what does he want to go traipsing about like this at night for? And it isn't the first time either.... Where is it he makes these expeditions to?"

"To snare rabbits," she said. "There's nothing wrong in it, you see. But come, there's been talk enough about it. Go to by-by again, boys. And above all, Castor and Pollux, don't fight. D'you hear? And no noise. The Captain's asleep; and he doesn't like to be disturbed, the Captain doesn't."

She took herself off, jumped over the ditch, crossed a meadow, in which her feet splashed up the water in the puddles, and gained a path which wound through a copse of young trees which only reached her shoulders. Twice already, the evening before, strolling with her comrade Saint-Quentin, she had followed this half-formed path, so that she went briskly forward without hesitating. She crossed two roads, came to a stream, the ...

To be continued...Of a sudden she quivered. One might have said that in thinking of this mischance she had brought it on them. She heard the sound of heavy footfalls coming along the ravine and making for its main entrance. She buried herself among the roots of the tree and they hid her. A man came in sight. He was wearing a long blouse; his face was encircled and hidden by a gray muffler; old, furred gloves covered his hands; he carried a gun on his arm, a mattock over his shoulder.

She thought that he must be a sportsman, or rather a poacher, for he walked with an uneasy air, looking carefully about him, like one who feared to be seen, and who was carefully changing his usual bearing. But he came to a standstill near the wall fifty or sixty yards from the spot at which Saint-Quentin had made the ascent, and studied the ground, turning over some flat stones and bending down over them.

At last he made up his mind and seizing one of these slabs by its narrower end, he raised it and set it up on end in such a manner that it 

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