ad been announced; the attendants had already carried the
young ones asleep to the vehicle; and she was in the act of taking
leave. We looked round at this disturbed party, guessing very likely
what the subject of their talk had been, to which, however, Miss Ethel
did not allude: but, announcing that she had intended to depart without
disturbing the two gentlemen, she bade us farewell and good night. "I
wish I could say a merry Christmas," she added gravely, "but none of us,
I fear, can hope for that." It was evident that Laura had told the last
chapter of the Colonel's story.

Madame de Floras rose up and embraced Miss Newcome, and, that farewell
over, she sank back on the sofa exhausted, and with such an expression
of affliction in her countenance, that my wife ran eagerly towards her.
"It is nothing, my dear," she said, giving a cold hand to the younger
lady, and sate silent for a few moments, during which we heard Florac's
voice without crying Adieu! and the wheels of Miss Newcome's carriage
when it drove away.

Our host entered a moment afterwards; and remarking, as Laura had done,
his mother's pallor and look of anguish, went up and spoke to her with
the utmost tenderness and anxiety.

She gave her hand to her son, and a faint blush rose up out of the past
as it were, and trembled upon her wan cheek. "He was the first friend I
ever had in the world, Paul," she said "the first and the best. He shall
not want, shall he, my son?"

No signs of that emotion in which her daughter-in-law had been indulging
were as yet visible in Madame de Florac's eyes, but, as she spoke,
holding her son's hand in hers, the tears at length overflowed, and with
a sob, her head fell forwards. The impetuous Frenchman flung himself on
his knees before his mother, uttered a hundred words of love and respect
for her, and with tears and sobs of his own called God to witness that
their friend should never want. And so this mother and son embraced each
other, and clung together in a sacred union of love, before which we
who had been admitted as spectators of that scene, stood hushed and
respectful.

That night Laura told me, how, when the ladies left us, the talk had
been entirely about the Colonel and Clive. Madame de Florac had spoken
especially, and much more freely than was her wont. She had told many
reminiscences of Thomas Newcome, and his early days; how her father
taught him mathematics when they were quite poor, and living in their