The prisoner reached the prison door in the dead of night and trying
to noiselessly turn the key in a pitiless lock, was never more timidly
bold.

When the countess had succeeded in rising to her seat without awakening
her keeper, she made a gesture of childlike joy which revealed the
touching naivete of her nature. But the half-formed smile on her burning
lips was quickly suppressed; a thought came to darken that pure brow,
and her long blue eyes resumed their sad expression. She gave a sigh
and again laid her hands, not without precaution, on the fatal conjugal
pillow. Then--as if for the first time since her marriage she found
herself free in thought and action--she looked at the things around her,
stretching out her neck with little darting motions like those of a bird
in its cage. Seeing her thus, it was easy to divine that she had once
been all gaiety and light-heartedness, but that fate had suddenly mown
down her hopes, and changed her ingenuous gaiety to sadness.

The chamber was one of those which, to this day octogenarian porters
of old chateaus point out to visitors as "the state bedroom where Louis
XIII. once slept." Fine pictures, mostly brown in tone, were framed
in walnut, the delicate carvings of which were blackened by time. The
rafters of the ceiling formed compartments adorned with arabesques in
the style of the preceding century, which preserved the colors of the
chestnut wood. These decorations, severe in tone, reflected the light
so little that it was difficult to see their designs, even when the sun
shone full into that long and wide and lofty chamber. The silver lamp,
placed upon the mantel of the vast fireplace, lighted the room so feebly
that its quivering gleam could be compared only to the nebulous stars
which appear at moments through the dun gray clouds of an autumn night.
The fantastic figures crowded on the marble of the fireplace, which was
opposite to the bed, were so grotesquely hideous that she dared not fix
her eyes upon them, fearing to see them move, or to hear a startling
laugh from their gaping and twisted mouths.

At this moment a tempest was growling in the chimney, giving to every
puff of wind a lugubrious meaning,--the vast size of the flute putting
the hearth into such close communication with the skies above that the
embers upon it had a sort of respiration; they sparkled and went out at
the will of the wind. The arms of the family of Herouville, carved in
white marble wi