“Eagle Madeleine Marie de Ferrier.” 
     “Eagle Madeleine Marie de Ferrier.”

She stood in her sitting room, which looked upon the lake, and before a word passed between us I saw she was unlike any of her former selves.  Her features were sharpened and whitened.  She looked beyond me with gray colored eyes, and held her lips apart.

“I have news.  The Indian brought me this letter from Albany.”

I could not help glancing curiously at the sheet in her hand, spotted on the back with broken red wafers.  It was the first letter I had ever seen.  Doctor Chantry told me he received but one during the winter from his sister, and paid two Spanish reals in postage for it, besides a fee and some food and whisky to the Indian who made the journey to deliver such parcels.  It was a trying and an important experience to receive a letter.  I was surprised that Madame Tank had recommended my sending one into the Wisconsin country.

“Count de Chaumont is gone; and I must have advice.”

“Madame,” I said, “Doctor Chantry was asleep, but I will wake him and bring him here.”

“No.  I will tell you.  Monsieur, my Cousin Philippe is dead.”

It might have shocked me more if I had known she had a Cousin Philippe.  I said stupidly: 

“Is he?”

“Cousin Philippe was my husband, you understand.”

“Madame, are you married?”

“Of course!” she exclaimed.  And I confessed to myself that in no other way could Paul be accounted for.

“But you are here alone?”

Two large tears ran down her face.

“You should understand the De Ferriers are poor, monsieur, unless something can be saved from our estates that the Bonapartes have given away.  Cousin Philippe went to see if we could recover any part of them.  Count de Chaumont thought it a favorable time.  But he was too old for such a journey; and the disappointments at the end of it.”

“Old!  Was he old, madame?”

“Almost as old as my father.”

“But you are very young.”

“I was only thirteen when my father on his deathbed married me to Cousin Philippe.  We were the last of our family.  Now Cousin Philippe is dead and Paul and I are orphans!”

She felt her loss as Paul might have felt his.  He was gurgling at Ernestine’s knee in the next room.

“I want advice,” she said; and I stood ready to give it, as a man always is; the more positively because I knew nothing of the world.

“Cousin Philippe said I must go to France, for Paul’s sake, and appeal myself to the empress, who has great influence over the emperor.  His command was to go at once.”

“Madame, you cannot go in midwinter.”

“Must I go at all?” she cried out passionately.  “Why don’t you tell me a De Ferrier shall not crawl the earth before a Bonaparte!  You—­of all men!  We are poor and exiles because we were royalists—­are royalists—­we always shall be royalists!  I would rather make a wood-chopper of Paul than a serf to this Napoleon!”