estic life. The family of St. Renan,
since the days of that ancestor who has been already mentioned as
having sojourned in Pondicherry, had never ceased to maintain some
relations with the East Indian possessions of France, and a relation
of the house in no very remote degree was at this time military
governor of the French East Indias, which were then, previous to the
unexampled growth of the British empire in the East, important,
flourishing, and full of future promise.

Thither, then, it was determined that Raoul should go in search of
adventures, if not of fortune, in the spring following the signature
of his marriage contract with the young demoiselle d'Argenson. And,
consequently, after a winter passed in quiet domestic happiness on the
noble estates, whereon the gentry of Britanny were wont to reside in
almost patriarchal state--a winter, every day of which the young
lovers spent in company, and at every eve of which they separated more
in love than they were at meeting in the morning--Raoul set sail in a
fine frigate, carrying several companies of the line, invested with
the rank of ensign, and proud to bear the colors of his king, for the
shores of the still half fabulous oriental world.

Three years had passed, and the boy had returned a man, the ensign had
returned a colonel, so rapid was the promotion of the nobility of the
sword in the French army, under the ancient regime; and--greatest
change of all, ay, and saddest--the Viscount of Douarnez had returned
Count de St. Renan. An infectious fever, ere he had been one year
absent from the land of his birth, had cut off his noble father in the
very pride and maturity of his intellectual manhood; nor had his
mother lingered long behind him whom she had ever loved so fondly. A
low, slow fever, caught from that beloved patient whom she had so
affectionately nurtured, was as fatal to her, though not so suddenly,
as it had proved to her good lord; and when their son returned to
France full of honors achieved, and gay anticipations for the future,
he found himself an orphan, the lord in lonely and unwilling state of
the superb demesnes which had so long called his family their owners.

There never in the world was a kinder heart than that which beat in
the breast of the young soldier, and never was a family more strictly
bound together by all the kindly influences which breed love and
confidence, and domestic happiness among all the members of it, than
that of St