It was already astir.

The citizens, with anxious faces, were talking together in little groups.

Soldiers were loitering about in the streets, totally regardless of the bugles and drums that were sounding in the marketplace, and at various points outside the town.

The civil functionaries, in their scarves of office, hurried fussily about, but for once they were unheeded.

But a week before, a denunciation by any of these men would have been sufficient to ensure the arrest and imprisonment, and probably the death, of anyone against whom they had a grudge.