He followed without lifting his eyes, apparently lost in thought.  The atrium on this side opened on a corridor which crossed the front door, and was closed by a door at either end—­the one admitting to the service rooms, the other to the library.  Flat columns relieved the blank wall of this passage, with monstrous copies of Raphael’s cartoons filling the interspaces; on the other hand four tall windows, two on either side of the door, looked out upon the porte cochere, the avenue, and the rolling hills beyond Axcester.  By one of these windows M. Raoul halted—­and Dorothea halted too, slightly puzzled.

“Ah, Mademoiselle, but there is one thing your brother forgets!  What became of his happy colonists in the end?  He told us that early in the fifth century the Emperor Honorius—­was it not?—­withdrew his legions, and wrote that Britain must henceforth look after itself.  I listened for the end of the story, but your brother did not supply it.  Yet sooner or later one and the same dreadful fate must have overtaken all these pleasant scattered homes—­sack and fire and slaughter—­ slaughter for all the men, for the women slavery and worse.  Does one hear of any surviving?  Out of this warm life into silence—­” He paused and shivered.  “Very likely they did not guess for a long while.  Look, Mademoiselle, at the Fosse Way, stretching yonder across the hills:  figure yourself a daughter of the old Roman homestead standing here and watching the little cloud of dust that meant the retreating column, the last of your protection.  You would not guess what it meant—­you, to whom each day has brought its restful round; who have lived only to be good and reflect the sunshine upon all near you.  And I—­your slave, suppose me, standing beside you—­might guess as little.”

He took a step and touched her hand.  His face was still turned to the window.

“Time! time!” he went on in a low voice, charged with passion.  “It eats us all!  Brr—­how I hate it!  How I hate the grave!  There lies the sting, Mademoiselle—­the torture to be a captive:  to feel one’s best days slipping away, and fate still denying to us poor devils the chance which even the luckiest—­God knows—­find little enough.”  He laughed, and to Dorothea the laugh sounded passing bitter.  “You will not understand how a man feels; how even so unimportant a creature as I must bear a sort of personal grudge against his fate.”

“I am trying to understand,” said Dorothea, gently.

“But this you can understand, how a prisoner loves the sunshine:  not because, through his grating, it warms him; but because it is the sunshine, and he sees it.  Mademoiselle, I am not grateful; I see merely, and adore.  Some day you shall pause by this window and see a cloud of dust on the Fosse Way—­the last of us prisoners as they march us from Axcester to the place of our release; and, seeing it, you shall close the book upon a chapter, but not without remembering”—­he touched her hand again, but now his fingers closed on it, and he raised it to his lips,—­“not without remembering how and when one Frenchman said, ‘God bless you, Mademoiselle Dorothea!’”