content, he forced his neighbour, the young Duke of Savoy, to do likewise. To the valleys also the persecution should extend.

. . . . . . . .

And Gaspard set his teeth hard as he brightened up his father’s sword; and Rénée’s tears fell fast as she folded away the snowy linen she had bleached so fair.

GASPARD SHARPENING HIS SWORD.

When the violets bloomed in the hedges long processions passed that were different indeed from marriage-trains. Trumpet-calls and the tramp of troops echoed from the hills and rocks; and the white walls of the church had been splashed with crimson, and were now blackened with fire.

Once more Rome had sent her ‘terror’ to the valleys. Once more faith was to be tried to the death, and steadfast souls to win their martyr crowns.

CHAPTER III.

VICTOR AMADEUS did not obey King Louis without a struggle. He was content with his Vaudois subjects; they were industrious and law-abiding, and they were a valuable defence against invasion from the west, and a check upon the bandits of the Alps. Why should he harry and hunt them forth to soothe the sore conscience of that tyrannical old man in Versailles?

But the French ambassador put the matter in a light which speedily convinced Victor Amadeus. His master, he said, King Louis, had resolved that heresy should be stamped utterly out. He would send an army to the Savoy valleys, an army quite strong enough to accomplish the purpose. The Duke of Savoy need not trouble himself at all. The work should be done, and thoroughly done, by the French alone, but—and the addition had a strong and grave significance—but the King of France would retain the Piedmont valleys for his trouble!

What could Duke Victor say? These Vaudois, after all, were heretics; his own father had done exactly what King Louis was now urging upon him to do; hesitation might be another name for lukewarmness in a holy cause. And at all risks he must avoid giving Louis an excuse for making good his footing on the soil of Savoy.

Therefore the proclamation was signed.

A terrible proclamation it was. It ordained complete cessation of every religious service, save that of the Romish faith; the immediate destruction of the churches; the banishment of the pastors, and the baptism of every child by Romish priests, who were henceforth to educate and control all young people.

The punishment for disobeying or evading this edict was death.

Dismay entered all hearts. Rome was once more to whet her savage sword. And the mountaineers, helpless, defenceless, could only die, since submission to such edicts could not be.

They remembered 1655, and the way in which a handful of men had beaten back Pianezza and his hordes.

The courage that had nerved Janavel and his heroes was still alight in the valleys. They too would fight for their homes and their churches, for the honour of their wives, for the faith of their little ones.

So entrenchments were thrown up in the ravines, and turf and rough stones piled up on every point of vantage; stores were hastily collected, and the corn-stacks were threshed out. The women did their part; even the children were busy as bees.

Henri Botta heard the careless laughter of a string of boys and girls as they ran up the steps of the mill, carrying each one a burden of wheat or rye, and his grave face grew sterner still as he harkened.

‘Little they know! little they know!’ he muttered in his beard. ‘Laugh! ‘tis the last laughter that will sound in Luserna for many and many a day.’

The horrors of the months that followed cannot here be told. Is it not an awful thing that men have committed atrocities of which one cannot speak—that living bodies and tortured souls have borne what our ears cannot suffer to hear—what our minds cannot endure to conceive? Frail women, modest and gentle girls, the babies too young to know the terror of the sword that slew them, the old men whose white hairs were but signals for scoff and insult—all these helpless ones were the butt and playthings of the brutal soldiers, whose most merciful dealing was death. Aye, happy were those whose doom was only death!

Botta and his two sons fought at the barricade which crossed the road above Casiana. Emile was amongst the first to fall. His father saw him stagger, and rushed forward to his help; but, as he reached upwards to where Emile lay on the ridge of the earthwork, a second ball crashed into the prostrate figure. The boy was shot through the heart.

‘Let him lie there,’ muttered Botta, with a quietude more sad than tears. ‘Let him lie there, on the crest of the barricade. Even in death he shall defend the valleys.’

Yet the heroism and devotion so lavishly poured out in those days and weeks of struggle were in vain. Once more the valleys were swept from north to south, from the Palavas Alps to the Po River—once more the red flames raged and triumphed above the cottage roofs; and over the fields, and by the swift torrent water, the flying people were hunted down and slain.

It was the end of April, 1686. The home of the Bottas was a blackened heap of ruin; the orchards, where the tufts of pink apple-blossom should be already showing, were hacked and hewed away, and the down-trodden vines lay in long trailing lines amid the wrecks of the village.

A few soldiers lounged and laughed in their encampments hard by; they were roasting a goat that they had shot for their supper, and their rude jokes as they did so roused noisy mirth. Their task of blood and cruelty had brutalized them to a degree hard to believe, did not one know how low human nature can fall when riot and licence cut away the cords of gentleness and justice, and the blood-thirst is awakened—that thirst which men share with the tigers.

Henri, the house-master, was gone from Rora; where, none could tell, for the Vaudois troops had been scattered like clouds before the tempest. Gaspard had come back alone, creeping up the passes in the night, hiding, and groping his dangerous way, to find out what had befallen his mother and Rénée.

He knew every nook and crevice of the ridges that rose grim and almost inaccessible between the ravine and Villaro; somewhere hereabouts he hoped to find them, unless—indeed——

And the young man’s haggard eyes gleamed with the look that it is ill to see on mortal face as he counted out what that ‘unless’ might mean.

His search was long, and his heart grew heavier hour by hour. Perhaps they had already been driven off to prison in Turin; or, perhaps—and if he were not to find them Gaspard knew that he ought to pray that it might be so—perhaps they had already joined Emile in the land where fighting and desolation and death is over for ever, where God Himself will give comfort and the calmness of His peace.

The dawn was breaking, the glad, sweet dawn of the spring