g you that the Sainte Aulaires are an ancient French
family of Bearnais extraction, and that my grandfather was the last
Marquis who bore the title. Holding large possessions in the _comtat_ of
Venaissin (a district which now forms part of the department of
Vaucluse) and other demesnes at Montlhery, in the province of the Ile de
France---"

"At Montlhery!" I exclaimed, suddenly recovering the lost link in my
memory.

"The Sainte Aulaires," continued the lady, without pausing to notice my
interruption, "were sufficiently wealthy to keep up their social
position, and to contract alliances with many of the best families in
the south of France. Towards the early part of the reign of Louis XIII.
they began to be conspicuous at court, and continued to reside in and
near Paris up to the period of the Revolution. Marshals of France,
Envoys, and Ministers of State during a period of nearly a century and a
half, the Sainte Aulaires had enjoyed too many honors not to be among
the first of those who fell in the Reign of Terror. My grandfather, who,
as I have already said, was the last Marquis bearing the title, was
seized with his wife and daughter at his Chateau near Montlhery in the
spring-time of 1793, and carried to La Force. Thence, after a mock
trial, they were all three conveyed to execution, and publicly
guillotined on the sixth of June in the same year. Do you follow me?"

"Perfectly."

"One survivor, however, remained in the person of Charles Armand, Prevot
de Sainte Aulaire, only son of the Marquis, then a youth of seventeen
years of age, and pursuing his studies in the seclusion of an old family
seat in Vaucluse. He fled into Italy. In the meantime, his inheritance
was confiscated; and the last representative of the race, reduced to
exile and beggary, assumed another name. It were idle to attempt to map
out his life through the years that followed. He wandered from land to
land; lived none knew how; became a tutor, a miniature-painter, a
volunteer at Naples under General Pepe, a teacher of languages in
London, corrector of the press to a publishing house in
Brussels--everything or anything, in short, by which he could honorably
earn his bread. During these years of toil and poverty, he married. The
lady was an orphan, of Scotch extraction, poor and proud as himself, and
governess in a school near Brussels. She died in the third year of their
union, and left him with one little daughter. This child became
henceforth