“Perfectly.”

“One survivor, however, remained in the person of Charles Armand, Prevot de Sainte Aulaire, only son of the Marquis, then a youth of seventeen years of age, and pursuing his studies in the seclusion of an old family seat in Vaucluse.  He fled into Italy.  In the meantime, his inheritance was confiscated; and the last representative of the race, reduced to exile and beggary, assumed another name.  It were idle to attempt to map out his life through the years that followed.  He wandered from land to land; lived none knew how; became a tutor, a miniature-painter, a volunteer at Naples under General Pepe, a teacher of languages in London, corrector of the press to a publishing house in Brussels—­everything or anything, in short, by which he could honorably earn his bread.  During these years of toil and poverty, he married.  The lady was an orphan, of Scotch extraction, poor and proud as himself, and governess in a school near Brussels.  She died in the third year of their union, and left him with one little daughter.  This child became henceforth his only care and happiness.  While she was yet a mere infant, he placed her in the school where her mother had been teacher.  There she remained, first as pupil, by-and-by as governess, for more than sixteen years.  The child was called by an old family name that had been her grandmother’s and her great-grandmother’s in the high and palmy days of the Sainte Aulaires—­Hortense.”

“Hortense!” I cried, rising from my chair.

“It is not an uncommon name,” said the lady.  “Does it surprise you?”

“I—­I beg your pardon, madam,” I stammered, resuming my seat.  “I once had a dear friend of that name.  Pray, go on.”

“For ten years the refugee contrived to keep his little Hortense in the safe and pleasant shelter of her Flemish home.  He led a wandering life, no one knew where; and earned his money, no one knew how.  Travel-worn and careworn, he was prematurely aged, and at fifty might well have been mistaken for a man of sixty-five or seventy.  Poor and broken as he was, however, Monsieur de Sainte Aulaire was every inch a gentleman of the old school; and his little girl was proud of him, when he came to the school to see her.  This, however, was very seldom—­never oftener than twice or three times in the year.  When she saw him for the last time, Hortense was about thirteen years of age.  He looked paler, and thinner, and poorer than ever; and when he bade her farewell, it was as if under the presentiment that they might meet no more.  He then told her, for the first time, something of his story, and left with her at parting a small coffer containing his decorations, a few trinkets that had been his mother’s, and his sword—­the badge of his nobility.”

The lady’s voice faltered.  I neither spoke nor stirred, but sat like a man of stone.

Then she went on again:—­