yll thrust his head and asked an explanation.

"The Frenchman's gone!" cried somebody.

He drew in his head, with a smile struggling on his countenance.

"You witch!" said he, "you must have your own way with me, even if it
takes a spell!"

CHAPTER XXXI -- FLIGHT

Long after, when Count Victor Jean de Montaiglon was come into great
good fortune, and sat snug by charcoal-fires in the chateau that bears
his name, and stands, an edifice even the Du Barry had the taste to
envy, upon the gusset of the roads which break apart a league to the
south of the forest of Saint Germain-en-Laye, he would recount, with
oddly inconsistent humours of mirth and tense dramatics, the manner of
his escape from the cell in the fosse of the great MacCailen. And always
his acutest memory was of the whipping rigour of the evening air, his
temporary sense of swooning helplessness upon the verge of the fantastic
wood. "Figure you! Charles," would he say, "the thin-blooded wand of
forty years ago in a brocaded waistcoat and a pair of dancing-shoes
seeking his way through a labyrinth of demoniac trees, shivering half
with cold and half with terror like a _forcat_ from the _bagne_ of
Toulouse, only that he knew not particularly from what he fled nor
whereto his unlucky footsteps should be turned. I have seen it often
since--the same place--have we not, _mignonne?_--and I avow 'tis as
sweet and friendly a spot as any in our own neighbourhood; but then in
that pestilent night of black and grey I was like a child, tenanting
every tiny thicket with the were-wolf and the sheeted spectre. There is
a stupid feeling comes to people sometimes in the like circumstances,
that they are dead, that they have turned the key in the lock of life,
as we say, and gone in some abstraction into the territory of shades.
'Twas so I felt, messieurs, and if in truth the ultimate place of
spirits is so mortal chilly, I shall ask Pere Antoine to let me have a
greatcoat as well as the viaticum ere setting out upon the journey."

It had been an insufferably cruel day, indeed, for Count Victor in his
cell had he not one solace, so purely self-wrought, so utterly fanciful,
that it may seem laughable. It was that the face of Olivia came before
him at his most doleful moments--sometimes unsought by his imagination,
though always welcome; with its general aspect of vague sweet sadness
played upon by fleeting smiles, her lips desirable to that degree he
could die upon them