ong freedom from anxiety. Since I
have lived here, I have gone to rest at night, and have not been afraid
of the morning," replied Trudaine. He went out into the passage while
he spoke, and called at the foot of the one flight of stairs which the
cottage possessed, "Rose! Rose! come down! The friend whom you most
wished to see has arrived at last."

She answered the summons immediately. The frank, friendly warmth of her
greeting; her resolute determination, after the first inquiries were
over, to help the guest to take off his upper coat with her own hands,
so confused and delighted Lomaque, that he hardly knew which way to
turn, or what to say.

"This is even more trying, in a pleasant way, to a lonely old fellow
like me," he was about to add, "than the unexpected civility of the hot
cup of coffee years ago"; but remembering what recollections even that
trifling circumstance might recall, he checked himself.

"More trying than what?" asked Rose, leading him to a chair.

"Ah! I forget. I am in my dotage already!" he answered, confusedly.
"I have not got used just yet to the pleasure of seeing your kind
face again." It was indeed a pleasure to look at that face now, after
Lomaque's last experience of it. Three years of repose, though they
had not restored to Rose those youthful attractions which she had lost
forever in the days of the Terror, had not passed without leaving kindly
outward traces of their healing progress. Though the girlish roundness
had not returned to her cheeks, or the girlish delicacy of color to her
complexion, her eyes had recovered much of their old softness, and her
expression all of its old winning charm. What was left of latent sadness
in her face, and of significant quietness in her manner, remained gently
and harmlessly--remained rather to show what had been once than what was
now.

When they were all seated, there was, however, something like a
momentary return to the suspense and anxiety of past days in their
faces, as Trudaine, looking earnestly at Lomaque, asked, "Do you bring
any news from Paris?"

"None," he replied; "but excellent news, instead, from Rouen. I have
heard, accidentally, through the employer whom I have been serving since
we parted, that your old house by the river-side is to let again."

Rose started from her chair. "Oh, Louis, if we could only live there
once more! My flower-garden?" she continued to Lomaque.

"Cultivated throughout," he answered, "by the late p