No,—­each sunrise appoints him one more day of imprisonment and exile!  Every sunset leaves him to one more night of cruel dreams which morning shall deride!  And while this can be said, what has Chalons, or any other spot on earth, that it should lure her into rest?

The higher powers sometimes convey their messages and do their work after a prosaic fashion.  It was no uncommon thing for a young girl in neat raiment to stand waiting admittance before the door of the Chateau Desperiers.  Hospitality was called upon in those days not so often, perhaps, as benevolence; and for its charity the chateau had a reputation far and wide; the expectation of the poor perished only in fruition there.

Into the library of this ancient mansion Elizabeth Montier was ushered by the old gray servant.  There she might wait the return of his mistress; at what hour the return should be anticipated he could not undertake to say.  His counsel to the stranger was, that she had better return at a later hour; but when Elizabeth said it was impossible, that she had come from a great distance to see the lady of the place, and must await her return there, he led her without further parley to the library, and left her.

And from its lofty windows, at her leisure, she might now look down upon the prospect Prisoner Manuel had described.  When she crossed the threshold of that room, she knew where she was; left alone, she looked around her.  There he once had stood; there he had parted from Madeline Desperiers; from that last interview he had gone forth to long captivity!  She stood by the lofty, narrow windows, to see what he had seen when standing before them,—­that town the ancient Desperiers laid out for his tenants in the ancient days,—­the church, the pond, the park,—­the garden, so vast, and so astonishing for beauty, the gazer scarce believed her eyes.  And she remembered beds of flowers under a prison-wall, and who that day looked on them.

He had said that the mistress of this grand domain was a soldier’s daughter.  He had said that she was a grand lady.  A soldier’s daughter had come here to hold an interview with her!  A drummer’s daughter, a girl from out the barracks and the prison of Foray, was here!—­A strange light, so strange that it seemed not natural, broke from these reflections of Elizabeth, and illuminated the library.  It fell on the great bookcases that were filled from floor to ceiling with books which cost a fortune, on the great easy-chairs black with age, on picture and on bust, on the old writing-stand, the more modern centre-table piled with newspapers and pamphlets, on the curious clock that told the hours with a “silverey voice.”  It fell, too, on a portrait that did not often greet the gaze even of such as found access into that room,—­a portrait of him for whose sake she was here, having compassed land and sea.