fault! Let that
suffice. And we parted--he to go his way, I mine. Then, some years
later, not many it is true, but still long enough for us to have
forgotten what had separated us, we met again, and once more he asked
me to be his wife, to renew the love vows we once had made. But it was
then impossible. I was affianced to your father--the day was fixed,
and I had come to admire him, to respect him; in no case would I have
gone back from my plighted word. So again we parted to meet only once
more in life."

The girl touched her hand--perhaps--who knows?--in admiration of her
mother's strength in keeping her vow to the man who was not her first
love and in discarding the man who was. And the marquise continued:

"It was one night a few weeks before he set out to join Turenne in the
Palatinate. A great _fete_ was given by Louis to celebrate his
birthday at St. Germain-en-Laye, his birthplace, and it was there we
met again. Presently, when both of us were able to escape from the
great crowd of courtiers, marshals, and ministers who surrounded the
king, he told me that he was glad he had met me once more--that he
wished to confide a secret to me if I would hear it, a charge if I
would accept it. At first I hesitated, then--when I found it would not
thrust against your father's honour"--again the girl stroked her
mother's hand--"I told him he might confide in me. Aurelie, he told me
that, embittered by having lost me, he had married in private an
English lady, daughter of a refugee, that he had learned to love her,
and that death had parted them after a few years of marriage. Also, he
told me, she left him a son, whom he had brought up in ignorance of
the position that must be his, but that--should he return from the
Palatinate--he meant to acknowledge him. He never did return, and his
son has never been acknowledged."

"Why, my mother?" asked Aurelie, with an upward glance. "Why?"

"Nay, child," the marquise replied. "Think no evil of me. No base
thoughts entered my mind. No remembrance that his son stood in the way
of your half-brother's inheritance--he and your father being
ostensibly De Vannes's heir. No! no! no! But in that hurried interval
both he and I had made one fatal slip--had committed one hideous act
of forgetfulness. He had forgotten to tell me--I to ask--where this
son was, and in what name he was known."

The girl dropped her hands with a despairing action into her lap; then
a moment later she turned th