en into the young Breton's heart.

He yearned for none of the gayer reunions in which he had before sought
for a pleasure that his nature had not found; for, amidst the amusements
of Paris, Alain remained intensely Breton--viz., formed eminently for
the simple joys of domestic life, associating the sacred hearthstone
with the antique religion of his fathers; gathering round it all the
images of pure and noble affections which the romance of a poetic
temperament had evoked from the solitude which had surrounded a
melancholy boyhood-an uncontaminated youth.

Duplessis entered abruptly, and with a countenance much disturbed from
its wonted saturnine composure.

"Marquis, what is this I have just heard from the Duchesse de Tarascon?
Can it be? You ask military service in this ill-omened war?--you?"

"My dear and best friend," said Alain, very much startled, "I should
have thought that you, of all men in the world, would have most approved
of my request--you, so devoted an Imperialist--you, indignant that the
representative of one of these families, which the First Napoleon
so eagerly and so vainly courted, should ask for the grade of
sous-lieutenant in the armies of Napoleon the Third--you, who of all men
know how ruined are the fortunes of a Rochebriant--you, feel surprised
that he clings to the noblest heritage his ancestors have left to
him--their sword! I do not understand you."

"Marquis," said Duplessis, seating himself, and regarding Alain with
a look in which were blended the sort of admiration and the sort of
contempt with which a practical man of the world, who, having himself
gone through certain credulous follies, has learned to despise the
follies, but retains a reminiscence of sympathy with the fools they
bewitch, "Marquis, pardon me; you talk finely, but you do not talk
common sense. I should be extremely pleased if your Legitimist scruples
had allowed you to solicit, or rather to accept, a civil appointment
not unsuited to your rank, under the ablest sovereign, as a civilian,
to whom France can look for rational liberty combined with established
order. Such openings to a suitable career you have rejected; but who
on earth could expect you, never trained to military service, to draw
a sword hitherto sacred to the Bourbons, on behalf of a cause which
the madness, I do not say of France but of Paris, has enforced on a
sovereign against whom you would fight to-morrow if you had a chance of
placing the desce