ir absence from their apartment should be detected. They
believed that if Narcisse arrived at the castle, they should find in him
a far less gentle jailer than the poor old man, for whose state their
kindly young hearts could not but grieve.

They heard that he had recovered consciousness enough to have made a
sort of confession; and Pere Bonami brought them his formal request, as
a dying man, for their pardon for all the injuries he had done them;
but his speech was too much affected for any specification of what
these were. The first thing they heard in early morning was that, in the
course of the night, he had breathed his last; and all day the bells
of all the churches round were answering one another with the slow,
swinging, melancholy notes of the knell.

In the early twilight, Pere Bonami brought a message that Madame de
Selinville requested M. le Baron to come and speak with her, and he was
accordingly conducted, with the gendarme behind him, to a small chamber
opening into the hall--the same where the incantations of the Italian
pedlar had been played off before Philip and Diane. The gendarme
remained outside the door by which they entered the little dark room,
only lighted by one little lamp.

'Here, daughter,' said the priest, 'is your cousin. He can answer the
question you have so much at heart;' and with these words Pere Bonami
passed beneath the black curtain that covered the entrance into the
hall, admitting as he raised it for a moment a floor of pure light from
the wax tapers, and allowing the cadence of the chanting of the priests
to fall on the ear. At first Berenger was scarcely able to discern the
pale face that looked as if tears were all dried up, and even before his
eyes had clearly perceived her in the gloom, she was standing before him
with clasped hands, demanding, in a hoarse, breathless whisper, 'Had he
said anything to you?'

'Anything? No, cousin,' said Berenger, in a kind tone. 'He had seemed
suffering and oppressed all dinner-time, and when the servants left us,
he murmured a few confused words, then sank.'

'Ah, ah, he spoke it not! Thank Heaven! Ah! it is a load gone. Then
neither will I speak it,' sighed Diane, half aloud. 'Ah! cousin, he
loved you.'

'He often was kind to us,' said Berenger, impelled to speak as tenderly
as he could of the enemy, who had certainly tortured him, but as if he
loved him.

'He bade us save you,' said Diane, her eyes shining with strange wild
lig