ting the impassable walls of his
tower.

Could it have been possible that she--the only woman that had ever
existed for him, the love for whom had so distorted his mind from its
natural sympathies, had killed in him the spring of youth and the
savour of life--never really learnt to love him in return till the
last?

And yet there was a woman's soul in that delicious woman's body--it
showed itself at least once, though until that supreme moment of union
and parting, it seemed as if a man's mind alone governed it, becoming
sterner, more unbendable, as hardships and difficulties multiplied.

In the melancholy phantasm passing before his mind's eye, of a period
of unprecedented bloodshed and savagery, when on the one side Chouans,
Vendeens, and such guerillas of which Madame de Savenaye was the
moving spirit, and on the other the _colonnes infernales_ of the
revolutionary leaders, vied with each other in ferocity and cunning,
she stood ever foremost, ever the central point of thought, with a
vividness that almost a score of years had failed to dim.

When the mood was upon him, he could unfold the roll of that story
buried now in the lonely graves of the many, or in the fickle memories
of the few, but upon his soul printed in letters of fire and blood--to
endure for ever.

Round this goddess of his young and only love clustered the sole
impressions of the outer world that had ever stirred his heart: the
grandeur of the ocean, of the storm, the glory of sunrise over a
dishevelled sea, the ineffable melancholy of twilight rising from an
unknown strand; then the solemn coldness of moonlight watches, the
scent of the burnt land under the fierce sun, when all nature was
hushed save the dreamy buzz of insect-life: the green coolness of
underwood or forest, the unutterable harmony of the sighing breeze,
and the song of wild birds during the long patient ambushes of
partisan war; the taste of bread in hunger, of the stream in the fever
of thirst, of approaching sleep in exhaustion--and, mixed with these,
the acrid emotions of fight and carnage, anguish of suspense, savage
exultation of victory--all the doings of a life which he, bred to
intellectual pleasures and high moral ideas, would have deemed a
nightmare, but which, lived as it was in the atmosphere of his longing
and devotion, yet held for him a strange and pungent joy: a cup of
cruel memories, yet one to be lingered over luxuriously till the
savour of each cherished d