sitated. "No more, Madame?" he faltered. He was tender-
hearted, and Tignonville was of his people.

"No more," she said gravely, bowing her head. "It is not M. de
Tignonville I have to thank, but Heaven's mercy, that I do not stand here
at this moment unhappy as I entered--a woman accursed, to be pointed at
while I live. And the dead"--she pointed solemnly through the dark
casement to the shore--"the dead lie there."

La Tribe went.

She stood a moment in thought, and then took the keys from the rough
stone window-ledge on which she had laid them when she entered. As the
cold iron touched her fingers she shuddered. The contact awoke again the
horror and misery in which she had groped, a lost thing, when she last
felt that chill.

"Take them," she said; and she gave them to Bigot. "Until my lord can
leave his couch they will remain in your charge, and you will answer for
all to him. Go, now, take the light; and in half an hour send Madame
Carlat to me."

A wave broke heavily on the causeway and ran down seething to the sea;
and another and another, filling the room with rhythmical thunders. But
the voice of the sea was no longer the same in the darkness, where the
Countess knelt in silence beside the bed--knelt, her head bowed on her
clasped hands, as she had knelt before, but with a mind how different,
with what different thoughts! Count Hannibal could see her head but
dimly, for the light shed upwards by the spume of the sea fell only on
the rafters. But he knew she was there, and he would fain, for his heart
was full, have laid his hand on her hair.

And yet he would not. He would not, out of pride. Instead he bit on his
harsh beard, and lay looking upward to the rafters, waiting what would
come. He who had held her at his will now lay at hers, and waited. He
who had spared her life at a price now took his own a gift at her hands,
and bore it.

"_Afterwards, Madame de Tavannes_--"

His mind went back by some chance to those words--the words he had
neither meant nor fulfilled. It passed from them to the marriage and the
blow; to the scene in the meadow beside the river; to the last ride
between La Fleche and Angers--the ride during which he had played with
her fears and hugged himself on the figure he would make on the morrow.
The figure? Alas! of all his plans for dazzling her had come--_this_!
Angers had defeated him, a priest had worsted him. In place of releasing
Tignonville after the f