o had been scanning his master's face with high expectation,
felt his heart leap as he thought he perceived a hidden tone of regret
in the question.

He drew himself up to his short height, and with a very decided voice
made answer straightway:

"I shall go away from your honour the day when your honour dismisses
me. If your honour decides to live on this rock till my hour, or his,
strikes--on this rock with him I remain. I am not conceited, I hope,
but what, pray, will become of your honour here without me?"

There was force in this last remark, simply as it was pronounced.
Through the mist of interlacing thoughts suggested by the word Peace!
(the end of the Revolution, that distant event which, nevertheless,
had had such sweeping influence over the course of his whole life), it
brought a faint smile to Sir Adrian's lips.

He took two steps forward and laid his hand familiarly on the man's
broad shoulder, and, in a musing way, he said at intervals:

"Yes, yes, indeed, good Renny, what would become of me?--what would
have become of me?--how long ago it seems!--without you? And yet it
might have been as well if two skeletons, closely locked in embrace,
blanched by the grinding of the waters and the greed of the crabs, now
reposed somewhere deep in the sands of that Vilaine estuary.... This
score of years, she has had rest from the nightmare that men have made
of life on God's beautiful earth. I have been through more of it, my
good Renny."

Rene's brain was never equal to coping with his master's periodic fits
of pessimism, though he well knew their first and ever-present cause.
In a troubled way he looked about the room, so peaceful, so retired
and studious; and Sir Adrian understood.

"Yes, yes, you are right; I have cut off the old life," he made answer
to the unspoken expostulation, "and that I can live in my own small
world without foregoing all my duties, I owe to you, my good friend;
but startling news like this brings back the past very livingly, dead
though it be--dead."

Rene hesitated; he was pondering over the advisability of disburdening
himself of yet another strange item of information he had in reserve;
but, as his master, rousing himself with an effort as if to dismiss
some haunting thought, turned round again to the table, he decided
that the moment was not propitious.

"So you have seen to all these things," said Sir Adrian wearily.
"Good; I will look over them."

He touched the neat pile