n of our neighbourhood; he was killed in a duel last
summer!"

"Ah! You are certain?"

"I had the misfortune to see the fight," sighed Anne.

"That accounts for it," said the Queen kindly. "If mademoiselle's
nerves were shaken by such a remembrance, it is not wonderful that
it should recur to her at so strange a watch as we have been
keeping."

"It might account for her seeing this revenant cavalier in any
passenger," said Lauzun, not satisfied yet.

"No one ever was like him," said Anne. "I could not mistake him."

"May I ask mademoiselle to describe him?" continued the count.

Feeling all the time as if this first mention were a sort of
betrayal, Anne faltered the words: "Small, slight, almost
misshapen--with a strange one-sided look--odd, unusual features."

Lauzun's laugh jarred on her. "Eh! it is not a flattering portrait.
Mademoiselle is not haunted by a hero of romance, it appears, so
much as by a demon."

"And none of those monsieur has employed in our escape answer to
that description?" asked the Queen.

"Assuredly not, your Majesty. Crooked person and crooked mind go
together, and St. Victor would only have trusted to your big honest
rowers of the Tamise. I think we may be satisfied that the
demoiselle's imagination was excited so as to evoke a phantom
impressed on her mind by a previous scene of terror. Such things
have happened in my native Gascony."

Anne was fain to accept the theory in silence, though it seemed to
her strange that at a moment when she was for once not thinking of
Peregrine, her imagination should conjure him up, and there was a
strong feeling within her that it was something external that had
flitted across the shadow, not a mere figment of her brain, though
the notion was evidently accepted, and she could hear a muttering of
Mrs. Labadie that this was the consequence of employing young
wenches with their whims and megrims.

The Count de Lauzun did his best to entertain the Queen with stories
of revenants in Gascony and elsewhere, and with reminiscences of his
eleven years' captivity at Pignerol, and his intercourse with
Fouquet; but whenever in aftertimes Anne Woodford tried to recall
her nocturnal drive with this strange personage, the chosen and very
unkind husband of the poor old Grande Mademoiselle, she never could
recollect anything but the fierce glare of his eyes in the light of
the lamps as he put her to that terrible interrogation.

The talk was chiefly