e worked for twenty years,
and this is the end of it all. I might have left poor Joseph in exile. I
might have allowed Lancilly to tumble into ruins. What has come of it
all! Nothing, nothing but disappointment and failure. Is it not enough
to break a man's heart, to give the best of his whole life, and to
fail!"

The wind went on roaring. Absorbed in his own thoughts, he did not hear
the house door open and shut, then the door of the room, then the light
steps of Angelot and Helene across the floor.

"Look up, Urbain!" his wife said with a sudden inspiration. "_There_ is
your success, dear friend!"

There was a bright pink colour in Helene's cheeks; her eyes and lips,
once so sad, were smiling in perfect content; her fair curls were blown
about her face; she was gloriously beautiful. Angelot held her hand, and
his dark eyes glowed as he looked at her.

"We have been fighting the elements," he said.

Urbain and Anne gazed at them, these two splendid young creatures for
whom life was beginning. The philosopher's brow and eyes lightened
suddenly, and he smiled.

"And by your triumphant looks, you have conquered them!" he said. "Is
that my doing, Anne? Is that my success, my victory?" he added after a
moment in her ear. "Yes, dearest, you are right. Embrace me, my
children!"

* * * * *

Les Chouettes was shut up for seven years, and the country people were
shy of passing it in the dusk, for they said that under the old oaks you
might meet Monsieur Joseph with his gun and dog as of old, coming back
from a day's shooting. When old Joubard heard that, he said--and his
wife crossed herself at the saying--that he would rather meet Monsieur
Joseph, dead, than any living gentleman of Anjou.

But there came a time when young life took possession again of Les
Chouettes, and lovely little children played in the sandy court and
picked wild flowers and ran after butterflies in the meadow; when Madame
Ange de la Mariniere wandered out in the soft twilight, without fear of
ghosts or men, to meet her husband as he walked down the rugged lane
from the _landes_ after a long day's shooting.

And there were no plots now in Anjou, and neither Chouans nor police
haunted the woods; for Napoleon was at St. Helena, and France could
breathe throughout her provinces, for the iron bands were taken off her
heart, and the young generation might grow up without being cut down in
its flower.

It was at this