in her
own tongue of the land across the water where was her home -- the land
to which their father had lately passed, upon some mission the children
were too young to understand.

Now the faint dim memories had returned clear and strong. The long
silence was broken. Eagerly the boys strove to recall the past, and bit
by bit things pieced themselves together in their minds till they could
not but marvel how they had so long forgotten. Yet it is often so in
youth. Days pass by one after the other unnoticed and unmarked. Then all
in a moment some new train of thought or purpose is awakened, a new
element enters life, making it from that day something different; and by
a single bound the child becomes a youth -- the youth a man.

Some such change as this was passing over the twin brothers at this
time. A deep-seated dissatisfaction with their present surroundings had
long been growing up in their hearts. They were happy in a fashion in
the humble home at the mill, with good Jean the miller, and Margot his
wife who had been their nurse and a second mother to them all their
lives; but they knew that a great gulf divided them from the Gascon
peasants amongst whom they lived -- a gulf recognized by all those with
whom they came in contact, and in nowise bridged by the fact that the
brothers shared in a measure the simple peasant life, and had known no
other.

Their very name of De Brocas spoke of the race of nobles who had long
held almost sovereign rights over a large tract of country watered by
the Adour and its many tributary streams; and although at this time, the
year of grace 1342, the name of De Brocas was no more heard, but that of
the proud Sieur de Navailles who now reigned there instead, the old name
was loved and revered amongst the people, and the boys were bred up in
all the traditions of their race, till the eagle nature at last asserted
itself, and they felt that life could no longer go on in its old
accustomed groove. Had they not been taught from infancy that a great
future lay before them? and what could that future be but the winning
back of their old ancestral lands and rights?

Perhaps they would have spoken more of this deeply-seated hope had it
not been so very chimerical -- so apparently impossible of present
fulfilment. To wrest from the proud and haughty Sieur de Navailles the
vast territory and strong castle that had been held by him in open
defiance of many mandates from a powerful King, was a