ever rested on me for an instant; and my heart was overwhelmed with bitterness and blackness.  I tore out her detested image; I felt I was done with her for ever; I laughed at myself savagely, because I had thought to please; when I lay down at night sleep forsook me, and I lay, and rolled, and gloated on her charms, and cursed her insensibility, for half the night.  How trivial I thought her! and how trivial her sex!  A man might be an angel or an Apollo, and a mustard-coloured coat would wholly blind them to his merits.  I was a prisoner, a slave, a contemned and despicable being, the butt of her sniggering countrymen.  I would take the lesson:  no proud daughter of my foes should have the chance to mock at me again; none in the future should have the chance to think I had looked at her with admiration.  You cannot imagine any one of a more resolute and independent spirit, or whose bosom was more wholly mailed with patriotic arrogance, than I. Before I dropped asleep, I had remembered all the infamies of Britain, and debited them in an overwhelming column to Flora.

The next day, as I sat in my place, I became conscious there was some one standing near; and behold, it was herself!  I kept my seat, at first in the confusion of my mind, later on from policy; and she stood, and leaned a little over me, as in pity.  She was very still and timid; her voice was low.  Did I suffer in my captivity? she asked me.  Had I to complain of any hardship?

‘Mademoiselle, I have not learned to complain,’ said I.  ’I am a soldier of Napoleon.’

She sighed.  ‘At least you must regret La France,’ said she, and coloured a little as she pronounced the words, which she did with a pretty strangeness of accent.

‘What am I to say?’ I replied.  ’If you were carried from this country, for which you seem so wholly suited, where the very rains and winds seem to become you like ornaments, would you regret, do you think?  We must surely all regret! the son to his mother, the man to his country; these are native feelings.’

‘You have a mother?’ she asked.

‘In heaven, mademoiselle,’ I answered.  ’She, and my father also, went by the same road to heaven as so many others of the fair and brave:  they followed their queen upon the scaffold.  So, you see, I am not so much to be pitied in my prison,’ I continued:  ’there are none to wait for me; I am alone in the world.  ’Tis a different case, for instance, with yon poor fellow in the cloth cap.  His bed is next to mine, and in the night I hear him sobbing to himself.  He has a tender character, full of tender and pretty sentiments; and in the dark at night, and sometimes by day when he can get me apart with him, he laments a mother and a sweetheart.  Do you know what made him take me for a confidant?’

She parted her lips with a look, but did not speak.  The look burned all through me with a sudden vital heat.

’Because I had once seen, in marching by, the belfry of his village!’ I continued.  ’The circumstance is quaint enough.  It seems to bind up into one the whole bundle of those human instincts that make life beautiful, and people and places dear—­and from which it would seem I am cut off!’