ry careful of the Empress
of the French! They went to Saint-Cloud, and later to
Versailles, as they go to holy cities, praying. And the
Emperor himself grew younger, they said.

"Then came the news that the expected heir, a son, had
been born dead! Lies!

"I, Gilbert de Nesville, was in the forest when the
Empress of the French fell ill. When separated from the
others she called to Morny, and bade him drive for the
love of Heaven! And they drove--they drove to the
Trianon, and there was no one there. And there the child
was born. Morny held it in his arms. He came out to the
colonnade holding it in his arms, and calling for a
messenger. I came, and when I was close to Morny I
struck him in the face and he fell senseless. I took the
child and wrapped it in my cloak. This is the truth!

"They dared not tell it; they dared not, for fear and
for shame. They said that an heir had been born dead;
and they mourned for their dead son. It was only a
daughter. She is alive; she loves me, and, God forgive
me, I hate her for defeating my just vengeance.

"And I call her Lorraine de Nesville."

XXVI

THE SHADOW OF POMP

The long evening shadows were lengthening among the trees; sleepy
birds twitted in dusky thickets; Lorraine slept.

Jack still stood staring at the paper in his hands, trying to
understand the purport of what he read and reread, until the page
became a blur and his hot eyes burned.

All the significance of the situation rose before him. This
child, the daughter of the oath-breaker, the butcher of December,
the sly, slow diplomate of Europe, the man of Rome, of Mexico,
the man now reeling back to Chalons under the iron blows of an
aroused people. In Paris, already, they cursed his name; they
hurled insults at the poor Empress, that mother in despair.
Thiers, putting his senile fingers in the porridge, stirred a
ferment that had not even germinated since the guillotine towered
in the Place de la Concorde and the tumbrils rattled through the
streets. He did not know what he was stirring. The same impulse
that possessed Gladstone to devastate trees animated Thiers. He
stirred the dangerous mess because he liked to stir, nothing
more. But from that hell's broth the crimson spectre of the
Commune was to rise, when the smoke of Sedan had drifted clear of
a mutilated nation.

Through the heavy clouds of death which we