grand ecuyer, approaching
him.

But he saw that his poor tutor, without a hat in the falling snow, was in
a most deplorable condition.

"They stopped me, and they robbed me," he cried. "The villains, the
assassins! they prevented me from calling out; they stopped my mouth with
a handkerchief."

At this noise, Grandchamp at length came, rubbing his eyes, like one just
awakened. Laure, terrified, ran into the church to her mistress; all
hastily followed her to reassure Marie, and then surrounded the old Abbe.

"The villains! they bound my hands, as you see. There were more than
twenty of them; they took from me the key of the side door of the
church."

"How! just now?" said Cinq-Mars; "and why did you quit us?"

"Quit you! why, they have kept me there two hours."

"Two hours!" cried Henri, terrified.

"Ah, miserable old man that I am!" said Grandchamp; "I have slept while
my master was in danger. It is the first time."

"You were not with us, then, in the confessional?" continued Cinq-Mars,
anxiously, while Marie tremblingly pressed against his arm.

"What!" said the Abbe, "did you not see the rascal to whom they gave my
key?"

"No! whom?" cried all at once.

"Father Joseph," answered the good priest.

"Fly! you are lost!" cried Marie.

ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

They have believed me incapable because I was kind
They tremble while they threaten

CINQ MARS

By ALFRED DE VIGNY

BOOK 6

CHAPTER XXII

THE STORM

'Blow, blow, thou winter wind;
Thou art not so unkind
As man's ingratitude.
Thy tooth is not so keen,
Because thou art not seen,
Although thy breath be rude.
Heigh-ho! sing, heigh-ho! unto the green holly.
Most friendship is feigning; most loving mere folly.'

SHAKESPEARE.

Amid that long and superb chain of the Pyrenees which forms the embattled
isthmus of the peninsula, in the centre of those blue pyramids, covered
in gradation with snow, forests, and downs, there opens a narrow defile,
a path cut in the dried-up bed of a perpendicular torrent; it circulates
among rocks, glides under bridges of frozen snow, twines along the edges
of inundated precipices to scale the adjacent mountains of Urdoz and
Oleron, and at last rising over their unequal ridges, turns their
nebulous peak into a new country which has also its mountains and its
depths, and, quitting Fr