t she is weak and languid, so I told her she must
stop in bed for to-day. Do not look anxious. I have no doubt that
she will be well enough to be up to-morrow. She has been sleeping
ever since she went to bed yesterday, and when she woke she had
a basin of broth. I think by to-morrow she will be well enough to
get up. But it will be some time before she is herself again. It
is a terrible strain for her to have gone through, but she was very
brave all the time we were in prison. She had such confidence in
you, she felt sure that you would manage somehow to rescue us."

Alter breakfast Jeanne strolled down with Harry to the river-side.

"I feel strange with you, Harry," she said. "Before you seemed
almost like a brother, and now it is so different."

"Yes; but happier?" Harry asked gently.

"Oh, so much happier, Harry! But there is one thing I want to tell
you. It might seem strange to you that I should tell you I loved you
on my own account without your speaking to the head of the family."

"But there was no time for that, Jeanne," Harry said smiling.

"No," Jeanne said simply. "I suppose it would have been the same
anyhow; but I want to tell you, Harry, that in the first letter
which she sent me when she was in prison, Marie told me, that as
she might not see me again, she thought it right I should know that
our father and mother had told her that night we left home that
they thought I cared for you. You didn't think so, did you, Harry?"
she broke off with a vivid blush. "You did not think I cared for
you before you cared for me?"

"No, indeed, Jeanne," he said earnestly. "It never entered my mind.
You see, dear, up to the beginning of that time I only felt as a
boy, and in England lads of eighteen or nineteen seldom think about
such things at all. It was only afterwards, when somehow the danger
and the anxiety seemed to make a man of me, when I saw how brave
and thoughtful and unselfish you were, that I knew I loved you, and
felt that if you could some day love me, I should be the happiest
fellow alive. Before that I thought of you as a dear little girl
who inclined to make rather too much of me because of that dog
business. And did you really care for me then?"

"I never thought of it in that way, Harry, any more than you did,
but I know now that my mother was right, and that I loved you all
along without knowing it. My dear father and mother told Marie
that they thought I was fond of you, and that, if at an