of a lifetime. And as he talked, Anne came gradually nearer,
till at last, with a most unusual demonstrativeness, her arm was round
his neck, and her cheek pressed against his whitening hair. Large tears
ran down the man's face and dropped across his wife's hand and splashed
on the tapestried arm of the chair.

The Sainfoys were about to leave Lancilly, and probably for ever.
Adelaide could not endure it; since her daughter's marriage it had
become odious to her. Neither did Georges like it; and before going back
to the army he had become engaged to the heiress with whom he had danced
so much at the ball, who had a castle and large estates of her own in
Touraine, and who considered Lancilly far too wild and old-fashioned to
be inhabited, except perhaps for a month in the shooting season. Thus it
was not unlikely that Lancilly would be sold; and for the present it
was to be dismantled and shut up; once more the deserted place, the
preservation of which, the restoring to its right inhabitants, had been
the dream and ambition of Urbain de la Mariniere's life. For his cousin
Herve he had spent all his energies and a considerable part of his
fortune; and to no purpose and worse than none. Even Herve's love and
gratitude failed him now; the knowledge that Herve could never quite
forget or forgive his plotting with Adelaide and Ratoneau, was the
sharpest sting of all; worse even, as his wife felt with a throb of
rapturous joy, than the fact that Adelaide would smile on him no more.

"My poor Urbain!" she murmured.

Her sympathy was tender and real, though she felt that her prayer had
been answered, that she and her house had been delivered from the
crushing weight of Lancilly, that the great castle on the hill would
henceforth be a harmless pile of stones, to be viewed without the old
dislike and jealousy. It seemed to her now that she had not known a
happy day since the Sainfoys came back, or even for long before, while
Urbain's whole soul was wrapped up in preparing for them. Yet she was
very sorry for Urbain.

"All for nothing, and worse than nothing," he sighed; and she found no
words to comfort him.

The fire crackled and blazed; outside, the wind rolled in great
thundering blasts over the country. It roared so loudly in the chimneys
that nothing else was to be heard. Urbain went on talking, so low that
his wife, stooping over his chair, could hardly hear him; but she knew
that all he said had the one refrain--"I hav