him from being brought to trial.  The duke had no reason to repent this protection given to the old bonesetter.  Beauvouloir saved the life of the Marquis de Saint-Sever in so dangerous an illness that any other physician would have failed in doing so.  But the wounds of the duchess were too deep-seated and dated too far back to be cured, especially as they were constantly kept open in her home.  When her sufferings warned this angel of many sorrows that her end was approaching, death was hastened by the gloomy apprehensions that filled her mind as to the future.

“What will become of my poor child without me?” was a thought renewed every hour like a bitter tide.

Obliged at last to keep her bed, the duchess failed rapidly, for she was then unable to see her son, forbidden as he was by her compact with his father to approach the house.  The sorrow of the youth was equal to that of the mother.  Inspired by the genius of repressed feeling, Etienne created a mystical language by which to communicate with his mother.  He studied the resources of his voice like an opera-singer, and often he came beneath her windows to let her hear his melodiously melancholy voice, when Beauvouloir by a sign informed him she was alone.  Formerly, as a babe, he had consoled his mother with his smiles, now, become a poet, he caressed her with his melodies.

“Those songs give me life,” said the duchess to Beauvouloir, inhaling the air that Etienne’s voice made living.

At length the day came when the poor son’s mourning began.  Already he had felt the mysterious correspondences between his emotions and the movements of the ocean.  The divining of the thoughts of matter, a power with which his occult knowledge had invested him, made this phenomenon more eloquent to him than to all others.  During the fatal night when he was taken to see his mother for the last time, the ocean was agitated by movements that to him were full of meaning.  The heaving waters seemed to show that the sea was working intestinally; the swelling waves rolled in and spent themselves with lugubrious noises like the howling of a dog in distress.  Unconsciously, Etienne found himself saying:—­

“What does it want of me?  It quivers and moans like a living creature.  My mother has often told me that the ocean was in horrible convulsions on the night when I was born.  Something is about to happen to me.”

This thought kept him standing before his window with his eyes sometimes on his mother’s windows where a faint light trembled, sometimes on the ocean which continued to moan.  Suddenly Beauvouloir knocked on the door of his room, opened it, and showed on his saddened face the reflection of some new misfortune.

“Monseigneur,” he said, “Madame la duchesse is in so sad a state that she wishes to see you.  All precautions are taken that no harm shall happen to you in the castle; but we must be prudent; to see her you will have to pass through the room of Monseigneur the duke, the room where you were born.”