nhappy Adrian, ragged and
degraded into a mere fighting beast, roamed through the Marais with
Chouan bands, hunted down by the merciless revolutionists, like
vermin; falling, as months of that existence passed over him, from his
high estate to the level of vermin indeed; outlawed, predatory,
cunning, slinking, filthy--trapped at last, the fit end of vermin!

Scarcely better the long months of confinement in the hulks of
Rochelle. How often he had regretted it, then, not to have been one of
the chosen few who, the day after capture, stood in front of six
levelled muskets, and were sped to rest in some unknown charnel!
Then!--not now. No, it was worth having lived to this hour, to know of
that fair face, in living sleep upon his pillow, under the safeguard
of his roof.

Good it was, that he had escaped at last, though with the blood of one
of his jailors red upon his hands; the blood of a perhaps innocent
man, upon his soul. It was the only time he had taken a life other
than in fair fight, and the thought of it had been wont to fill him
with a sort of nausea; but to-night, he found he could face it, not
only without remorse, but without regret. He was glad he had listened
to Rene's insidious whispers--Rene, who could not endure the captivity
to which his master might, in time, have fallen a passive, hopeless
slave, and yet who would have faced a thousand years of it rather than
escape alone--the faithful heart!

Yes, it was good, and he was glad of it, or time would not have come
when she (stay, how old was the child then?--almost three years, and
still sheltered and cherished by the house of Landale)--when she would
return, and gladden his eyes with a living sight of Cecile, while Rene
watched in his tower above; ay, and old Margery herself lay once more
near the child she had nursed.

Marvellous turn of the wheel of fate!

But, who had come for the children, and where had they been taken? To
their motherland, perhaps; even it might have been before he himself
had left it; or yet to Ireland, where still dwelt kinsfolk of their
blood? Probably it was at the breaking up of the family, caused by the
death of Sir Thomas, that these poor little birds had been removed
from the nest, that had held them so safe and close.

That was in '97, in the yellow autumn of which year Adrian Landale,
then French fisherman, parted from his brother Rene L'Apotre upon the
sea off Belle Isle; parted one grizzly dawn after embracing, as