ushed Raoul out of the room by the
shoulders. He glided swiftly down to the porch, regained his horse,
mounted, and set off as if he had had Monsieur's guards at his heels.

Chapter IV. Father and Son.

Raoul followed the well-known road, so dear to his memory, which led
from Blois to the residence of the Comte de la Fere.

The reader will dispense with a second description of that habitation:
he, perhaps, has been with us there before, and knows it. Only, since
our last journey thither, the walls had taken on a grayer tint, and the
brick-work assumed a more harmonious copper tone; the trees had grown,
and many that then only stretched their slender branches along the tops
of the hedges, now, bushy, strong, and luxuriant, cast around, beneath
boughs swollen with sap, great shadows of blossoms or fruit for the
benefit of the traveler.

Raoul perceived, from a distance, the two little turrets, the dove-cote
in the elms, and the flights of pigeons, which wheeled incessantly
around that brick cone, seemingly without power to quit it, like the
sweet memories which hover round a spirit at peace.

As he approached, he heard the noise of the pulleys which grated under
the weight of the heavy pails; he also fancied he heard the melancholy
moaning of the water which falls back again into the wells--a sad,
funereal, solemn sound, which strikes the ear of the child and the
poet--both dreamers--which the English call _splash_; Arabian poets
_gasgachau_; and which we Frenchmen, who would be poets, can only
translate by a paraphrase--_the noise of water falling into water_.

It was more than a year since Raoul had been to visit his father. He had
passed the whole time in the household of M. le Prince. In fact, after
all the commotions of the Fronde, of the early period of which we
formerly attempted to give a sketch, Louis de Conde had made a public,
solemn and frank reconciliation with the court. During all the time that
the rupture between the king and the prince had lasted, the prince, who
had long entertained a great regard for Bragelonne, had in vain offered
him advantages of the most dazzling kind for a young man. The Comte de
la Fere, still faithful to his principles of loyalty, and royalty, one
day developed before his son in the vaults of Saint Denis,--the Comte
de la Fere, in the name of his son, had always declined them. Moreover,
instead of following M. de Conde in his rebellion, the vicomte had
followed M. de Tu