ng the last night he sat with his eyes fixed
upon an ungrated window, for bars were not needed on the side of the
precipice. A light shone there all through the hours; and that instinct
of the heart, which is sometimes true, and as often false, cried within
him, "She is there!"

"She is certainly there! Tomorrow she will be mine," he said to himself,
and joy blended with the slow tinkling of a bell that began to ring.

Strange unaccountable workings of the heart! The nun, wasted by yearning
love, worn out with tears and fasting, prayer and vigils; the woman of
nine-and-twenty, who had passed through heavy trials, was loved more
passionately than the lighthearted girl, the woman of four-and-twenty,
the sylphide, had ever been. But is there not, for men of vigorous
character, something attractive in the sublime expression engraven on
women's faces by the impetuous stirrings of thought and misfortunes of
no ignoble kind? Is there not a beauty of suffering which is the most
interesting of all beauty to those men who feel that within them there
is an inexhaustible wealth of tenderness and consoling pity for a
creature so gracious in weakness, so strong with love? It is the
ordinary nature that is attracted by young, smooth, pink-and-white
beauty, or, in one word, by prettiness. In some faces love awakens
amid the wrinkles carved by sorrow and the ruin made by melancholy;
Montriveau could not but feel drawn to these. For cannot a lover,
with the voice of a great longing, call forth a wholly new creature? a
creature athrob with the life but just begun breaks forth for him alone,
from the outward form that is fair for him, and faded for all the world
besides. Does he not love two women?--One of them, as others see her,
is pale and wan and sad; but the other, the unseen love that his heart
knows, is an angel who understands life through feeling, and is adorned
in all her glory only for love's high festivals.

The General left his post before sunrise, but not before he had heard
voices singing together, sweet voices full of tenderness sounding
faintly from the cell. When he came down to the foot of the cliffs where
his friends were waiting, he told them that never in his life had
he felt such enthralling bliss, and in the few words there was that
unmistakable thrill of repressed strong feeling, that magnificent
utterance which all men respect.

That night eleven of his devoted comrades made the ascent in the
darkness. Eac