After an audience with the king I returned to France, where, both in Paris and in Vendee, I was fortunate enough to carry out his Majesty’s instructions.  Towards the end of May, being tracked by the Bonapartist authorities to whom I was denounced, I was obliged to fly from place to place in the character of a man endeavoring to get back to his estate.  I went on foot from park to park, from wood to wood, across the whole of upper Vendee, the Bocage and Poitou, changing my direction as danger threatened.

I reached Saumur, from Saumur I went to Chinon, and from Chinon I reached, in a single night, the woods of Nueil, where I met the count on horseback; he took me up behind him and we reached Clochegourde without passing any one who recognized me.

“Jacques is better,” were the first words he said to me.

I explained to him my position of diplomatic postman, hunted like a wild beast, and the brave gentleman in his quality of royalist claimed the danger over Chessel of receiving me.  As we came in sight of Clochegourde the past eight months rolled away like a dream.  When we entered the salon the count said:  “Guess whom I bring you?—­Felix!”

“Is it possible!” she said, with pendant arms and a bewildered face.

I showed myself and we both remained motionless; she in her armchair, I on the threshold of the door; looking at each other with that hunger of the soul which endeavors to make up in a single glance for the lost months.  Then, recovering from a surprise which left her heart unveiled, she rose and I went up to her.

“I have prayed for your safety,” she said, giving me her hand to kiss.

She asked news of her father; then she guessed my weariness and went to prepare my room, while the count gave me something to eat, for I was dying of hunger.  My room was the one above hers, her aunt’s room; she requested the count to take me there, after setting her foot on the first step of the staircase, deliberating no doubt whether to accompany me; I turned my head, she blushed, bade me sleep well, and went away.  When I came down to dinner I heard for the first time of the disasters at Waterloo, the flight of Napoleon, the march of the Allies to Paris, and the probable return of the Bourbons.  These events were all in all to the count; to us they were nothing.  What think you was the great event I was to learn, after kissing the children?—­for I will not dwell on the alarm I felt at seeing the countess pale and shrunken; I knew the injury I might do by showing it and was careful to express only joy at seeing her.  But the great event for us was told in the words, “You shall have ice to-day!” She had often fretted the year before that the water was not cold enough for me, who, never drinking anything else, liked it iced.  God knows how many entreaties it had cost her to get an ice-house built.  You know better than any one that a word, a look, an inflection of the voice, a trifling attention, suffices for love;