They made Hurlburt prosperously and found it vacant, for the news of
Falmouth's advance had driven the villagers hillward. There was in this
place a child, a naked boy of some two years, lying on a doorstep,
overlooked in his elders' gross terror. As the Queen with a sob lifted
this boy the child died.
"Starved!" said Osmund Heleigh; "and within a stone's throw of my snug
home!"
The Queen laid down the tiny corpse, and, stooping, lightly caressed
its sparse flaxen hair. She answered nothing, though her lips moved.
Past Vachel, scene of a recent skirmish, with many dead in the gutters,
they were overtaken by Falmouth himself, and stood at the roadside to
afford his troop passage. The Marquess, as he went by, flung the Queen a
coin, with a jest sufficiently high flavored. She knew the man her
inveterate enemy, knew that on recognition he would have killed her as
he would a wolf; she smiled at him and dropped a curtsey.
"This is remarkable," Messire Heleigh observed. "I was hideously afraid,
and am yet shaking. But you, madame, laughed.
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