There was a noise of horses galloping, and the expected noble count arrived; being no other than De Chaumont with his post coaches.  He stepped out of the first, and Ernestine stepped out of the second, carrying Paul.  She took him to his mother.  The door flew open, and the woman I adored received her child and walked back and forth with him.  Annabel leaned out while the horses were changed.  I saw Miss Chantry, and my heart misgave me, remembering her brother’s prolonged lament at separation from her.

He was, I trusted, already shut into one of those public beds which are like cupboards; for the day had begun for us at three of the morning.  But if he chose to show himself, and fall upon De Chaumont for luxurious conveyance to Paris, I was determined that Skenedonk and I should not appear.  I wronged my poor master, who told me afterwards he watched through a crack of the cupboard bed with his heart in his mouth.

The pause was a very short one, for horses are soon changed.  Madame de Ferrier threw a searching eye over the landscape.  It was a mercy she did not see the hole in the grenier, through which I devoured her, daring for the first time to call her secretly—­Eagle—­the name that De Chaumont used with common freedom!  Now how strange is this—­that one woman should be to a man the sum of things!  And what was her charm I could not tell, for I began to understand there were many beautiful women in the world, of all favors, and shapely perhaps as the one of my love.  Only her I found drawing the soul out of my body; and none of the others did more than please the eye like pictures.

The carriages were gone with the sun, and it was no wonder all fell gray over the world.

De Chaumont had sailed behind us, and he would be in Paris long before us.

I had first felt some uneasiness, and dread of being arrested on our journey; though our Breton captain—­who was a man of gold that I would travel far to see this day, if I could, even beneath the Atlantic, where he and his ship now float—­obtained for us at Dieppe, on his own pledge, a kind of substitute for passports.  We were a marked party, by reason of the doctor’s lameness and Skenedonk’s appearance.  The Oneida, during his former sojourn in France, had been encouraged to preserve the novelty of his Indian dress.  As I had nothing to give him in its place it did not become me to find fault.  And he would have been more conspicuous with a cocked hat on his bare red scalp, and knee breeches instead of buckskins.  Peasants ran out to look at him, and in return we looked at them with a good will.

We reached the very barriers of Paris, however, without falling into trouble.  And in the streets were so many men of so many nations that Skenedonk’s attire seemed no more bizarre than the turbans of the east or the white burnous of the Arab.

It was here that Skenedonk took his role as guide, and stalked through narrow crooked streets, which by comparison made New York, my first experience of a city, appear a plain and open village.