spirit, or whose bosom was more wholly mailed with patriotic
arrogance, than I. Before I dropped asleep, I had remembered all the
infamies of Britain, and debited them in an overwhelming column to
Flora.

The next day, as I sat in my place, I became conscious there was some
one standing near; and behold, it was herself! I kept my seat, at first
in the confusion of my mind, later on from policy; and she stood, and
leaned a little over me, as in pity. She was very still and timid; her
voice was low. Did I suffer in my captivity? she asked me. Had I to
complain of any hardship?

"Mademoiselle, I have not learned to complain," said I. "I am a soldier
of Napoleon."

She sighed. "At least you must regret _La France_," said she, and
coloured a little as she pronounced the words, which she did with a
pretty strangeness of accent.

"What am I to say?" I replied. "If you were carried from this country,
for which you seem so wholly suited, where the very rains and winds seem
to become you like ornaments, would you regret, do you think? We must
surely all regret! the son to his mother, the man to his country; these
are native feelings."

"You have a mother?" she asked.

"In heaven, mademoiselle," I answered. "She, and my father also, went by
the same road to heaven as so many others of the fair and brave: they
followed their queen upon the scaffold. So, you see, I am not so much to
be pitied in my prison," I continued: "there are none to wait for me; I
am alone in the world. 'Tis a different case, for instance, with yon
poor fellow in the cloth cap. His bed is next to mine, and in the night
I hear him sobbing to himself. He has a tender character, full of tender
and pretty sentiments; and in the dark at night, and sometimes by day
when he can get me apart with him, he laments a mother and a sweetheart.
Do you know what made him take me for a confidant?"

She parted her lips with a look, but did not speak. The look burned all
through me with a sudden vital heat.

"Because I had once seen, in marching by, the belfry of his village!" I
continued. "The circumstance is quaint enough. It seems to bind up into
one the whole bundle of those human instincts that make life beautiful,
and people and places dear--and from which it would seem I am cut off!"

I rested my chin on my knee and looked before me on the ground. I had
been talking until then to hold her; but I was now not sorry she should
go: an impression is a thing so del