l these piteous relations you shall know the importance of the
request I now set forth.

"My cousin by marriage of the House of Vaufontaine has lost all his
sons. With the death of the Prince of Vaufontaine, there is in
France no direct heir to the house, nor can it, by the law, revert
to my house or my heirs. Now of late the Prince hath urged me to
write to you--for he is here in seclusion with me--and to unfold to
you what has hitherto been secret. Eleven years ago the only nephew
of the Prince, after some naughty escapades, fled from the Court
with Rullecour the adventurer, who invaded the Isle of Jersey. From
that hour he has been lost to France. Some of his companions in
arms returned after a number of years. All with one exception
declared that he was killed in the battle at St. Heliers. One,
however, maintains that he was still living and in the prison
hospital when his comrades were set free.

"It is of him I write to you. He is--as you will perchance
remember--the Comte de Tournay. He was then not more than seventeen
years of age, slight of build, with brownish hair, dark grey eyes,
and had over the right shoulder a scar from a sword thrust. It
seemeth little possible that, if living, he should still remain in
that Isle of Jersey. He may rather have returned to obscurity in
France or have gone to England to be lost to name and remembrance
--or even indeed beyond the seas.

"That you may perchance give me word of him is the object of my
letter, written in no more hope than I live; and you can well guess
how faint that is. One young nobleman preserved to France may yet
be the great unit that will save her.

"Greet my poor countrymen yonder in the name of one who still waits
at a desecrated altar; and for myself you must take me as I am, with
the remembrance of what I was, even

"Your faithful friend and loving kinsman,

"CHANIER."

"All this, though in the chances of war you read it not till
wintertide, was told you at Rouen this first day of September 1792."

During the reading, broken by feeling and reflective pauses on the
chevalier's part, the listeners showed emotion after the nature of each.
The Sieur de Mauprat's fingers clasped and unclasped on the top of his
cane, little explosions of breath came from his compressed lips, his
eyebrows beetled over till the eyes themselves se