ired.

"I came into this land of inquisitive people to buy mules," laughed
Maurice, striking his belt of money.

On hearing the jingle of the coin the man lifted his cap deferentially.
Raising mules was the chief industry of the country. This bourgeois was
very young, but he had a well-filled purse, and that was enough.

"You will excuse me," resumed the host, in quite a different tone. "You
see, we are obliged to be very careful. There has been some trouble in
Montaignac."

The imminence of the peril and the responsibility devolving upon
him, gave Maurice an assurance unusual to him; and it was in the most
careless, off-hand manner possible that he concocted a quite plausible
story to explain his early arrival on foot accompanied by a sick wife.
He congratulated himself upon his address, but the old corporal was far
from satisfied.

"We are too near the frontier to bivouac here," he grumbled. "As soon as
the young lady is on her feet again we must hurry on."

He believed, and Maurice hoped, that twenty-four hours of rest would
restore Marie-Anne.

They were mistaken. The very springs of life in her existence seemed to
have been drained dry. She did not appear to suffer, but she remained in
a death-like torpor, from which nothing could arouse her. They spoke to
her but she made no response. Did she hear? did she comprehend? It was
extremely doubtful.

By rare good fortune the mother of the proprietor proved to be a
good, kind-hearted old woman, who would not leave the bedside of
Marie-Anne--of Mme. Dubois, as she was called at the Traveller's Rest.

It was not until the evening of the third day that they heard Marie-Anne
utter a word.

"Poor girl!" she sighed; "poor, wretched girl!"

It was of herself that she spoke.

By a phenomenon not very unusual after a crisis in which reason has been
temporarily obscured, it seemed to her that it was someone else who had
been the victim of all the misfortunes, whose recollections gradually
returned to her like the memory of a painful dream.

What strange and terrible events had taken place since that August
Sabbath, when, on leaving the church with her father, she heard of the
arrival of the Duc de Sairmeuse.

And that was only eight months ago.

What a difference between those days when she lived happy and envied in
that beautiful Chateau de Sairmeuse, of which she believed herself the
mistress, and at the present time, when she found herself lying in the
comf