elve months,
the poor delinquent was incarcerated. In this mouldy mansion she either
knitted or stared vacantly out at the rank unkempt grass and the
dilapidated fences, kept by poverty unrepaired, while her parent
reiterated stories of the grand old days when the tapestried chairs,
woefully faded, had been fresh and beauteous, and when the de Quesne
nobles had flitted from the splendours of the Tuilleries to hold rural
court within those blackened portals now so severe of aspect, so
melancholy and silent with the pulselessness of stagnation.

A sore punishment this for having confessed in her heart's _naivete_ a
passion for a hero of the brush, a vagrant in velveteen who painted
pictures and--vulgarian!--sold them to any patronising passer-by. It was
penalty dire enough for a _debutante_ who had but sipped Paris, it waxed
doubly dreadful to inquiring Eve within scent of the apple tree. There
were tears at first, sobs of despair, then dumb contumacy, and
latterly--when the spring weather returned again--kicks! But the pricks
of family pride were sharp to lunge against, and many drops of heart's
blood were spilt in the exercise. Restrictions only grew more rigid, and
the poor little damsel, who had tricoteed sombrely in the ancestral
dungeon during the winter, was, in summer, never permitted to roam
without the vigilant companionship of the substantial retainer
Valentine, a worthy who, from her elaborately starched _coiffe_ to the
heels of her _sabots_, was strongly imbued with a sense of conscientious
vassalage to "Madame," as Leonie's mother in these degenerate days
condescended to be styled.

But love, which laughs at iron bars, makes also mock at the effrontery
of blue blood. There came a day, not long after Ralph Hilyard's sudden
arrival at St Malo, when, Valentine's expansive back being for a moment
turned, a two-lined scribble on a shred of drawing paper was placed in
Mademoiselle de Quesne's hands.

It said curtly, with concise eloquence:--

"I want you. I can live without you no longer."

The opportunity presented itself in this wise. Though cut off from all
other pleasures of youth, Leonie was, at midsummer, for the short six
weeks' season, allowed to bathe in the sea, attended by the faithful
Valentine. She crossed daily to St Malo on the "_Pont Roulant_"--a
quaint structure that, moved by chains and steam, plies the water on
sand-embedded rails--and there joined in the acquatic gambols of the
merry crow