They heard nothing of the roll of drums, of the shrieks of the mob, of the dull crash of the knife, of the streams of blood, in the Place.

They saw nothing of the horrors of the prison-houses, in which, day by day, and week by week, the doomed citizens made their brief sojourn on the road to death.
They did not even know, as I did, that one evening, in one of the sad batches which rode from the Austin Convent to the Conciergerie, and next morning from the Conciergerie to the guillotine, rode a broken-down couple called Lestrange, and beside them, in the same cart, the _ci- devant_ Citizen Cazin.
As the Citoyennes Regnier sat patiently and knitted red caps for the blood-drunken citizens without, their gentle ears may have caught occasional shouts and rushings of feet, and they may have guessed something of the tragedies that were being enacted below.

But they kept their own counsel, and looked out seldom from the little window, and talked in whispers of the shadows that flitted across Lough Swilly, and the happy life that was to follow after all this buffeting and exile.
Alas! that was not to be yet.

For all their courage, their cheeks grew daily more pale; and into that little damp, cold attic, from which they never ventured except at night, and where, as poverty gradually entered by the window, the fire went out on the hearth, the stress of "the terror" at last penetrated.
Our hostess, the grim woman of whom I spoke, was the first to lose nerve, and during the day, when I was away, would come and retail some of the horrors she herself had witnessed.

I could tell by their blank looks when I returned that some one had been tampering with their peace, and I fear the warmth with which I expostulated with the disturber did us all no good.
Another day, also when I was absent, the police made a visitation; and though my two mistresses passed muster, they carried off one shrieking victim from the floor below--a widow, whose only crime was that her husband had once been in the service of his king.