rs lay the papers which had served to vindicate his
honour in that old affair, in which the unsought love of another had
brought on him shame and affliction. As his eye fell on the last, he
muttered to him self, "I kept these, to clear my repute. Can I keep
those, when, if found, they might compromise the repute of her who
might have been my wife had I been worthy of her? She is doubtless now
another's; or, if dead,--honour never dies." He pressed his lips to the
letters with a passionate, lingering, mournful kiss; then, raking up the
ashes of yesterday's fire, and rekindling them, he placed thereon those
leaves of a melancholy romance in his past, and watched them slowly,
reluctantly smoulder away into tinder. Then he opened a drawer in which
lay the only paper of a political character which he had preserved. All
that related to plots or conspiracies in which his agency had committed
others, it was his habit to destroy as soon as received. For the sole
document thus treasured he alone was responsible; it was an outline
of his ideal for the future constitution of France, accompanied with
elaborate arguments, the heads of which his conversation with the
Incognito made known to the reader. Of the soundness of this political
programme, whatever its merits or faults (a question on which I presume
no judgment), he had an intense conviction. He glanced rapidly over its
contents, did not alter a word, sealed it up in an envelope, inscribed,
"My Legacy to my Countrymen." The papers refuting a calumny relating
solely to himself he carried into the battle-field, placed next to his
heart,--significant of a Frenchman's love of honour in this world--as
the relic placed round the neck of Enguerrand by his pious brother was
emblematic of the Christian hope of mercy in the next.

CHAPTER XVIII.

The streets swarmed with the populace troops as they passed to their
destination. Among those of the Mobiles who especially caught the eye
were two companies in which Enguerrand de Vandemar and Victor de Mauleon
commanded. In the first were many young men of good family, or in the
higher ranks of the bourgeoisie, known to numerous lookers-on; there was
something inspiriting in their gay aspects, and in the easy carelessness
of their march. Mixed with this company, however, and forming of course
the bulk of it, were those who belonged to the lower classes of the
population; and though they too might seem gay to an ordinary observer,
the g