But none of these sounds had warned Juliette de Gemosac, who sat alone in the little white room upstairs, nor Marie and her husband, dumb and worn by the day's toil, who awaited bedtime on a stone seat by the stable door.
Juliette, standing at the open window, heard Jean stir himself, and shuffle, in his slippers, toward the gate.
"It is some one who comes on foot," she heard Marie say.

"Some beggar--the roads are full of them.

See that he gets no farther than the gate." She heard Jean draw back the bolts and answer gruffly, in a few words, through the interstice of a grudging door, what seemed to be inquiries made in a voice that was not the voice of a peasant.

Marie rose and went to the gate.

In a few minutes they returned, and Juliette drew back from the window, for they were accompanied by the new-comer, whose boots made a sharper, clearer sound on the cobble-stones.
"Yes," Juliette heard him explain, "I am an Englishman, but I come from Monsieur de Gemosac, for all that.