to you the Vicomte Anne de Keroual de Saint-Yves, a
private soldier."

"I knew it!" cried the boy; "I knew he was a noble!"

And I thought the eyes of Miss Flora said the same, but more
persuasively. All through this interview she kept them on the ground, or
only gave them to me for a moment at a time, and with a serious
sweetness.

"You may conceive, my friends, that this is rather a painful
confession," I continued. "To stand here before you vanquished, a
prisoner in a fortress, and take my own name upon my lips, is painful to
the proud. And yet I wished that you should know me. Long after this we
may yet hear of one another--perhaps Mr. Gilchrist and myself in the
field and from opposing camps--and it would be a pity if we heard and
did not recognise."

They were both moved; and began at once to press upon me offers of
service, such as to lend me books, get me tobacco if I used it, and the
like. This would have been all mighty welcome, before the tunnel was
ready. Now it signified no more to me than to offer the transition I
required.

"My dear friends," I said--"for you must allow me to call you that, who
have no others within so many hundred leagues--perhaps you will think me
fanciful and sentimental; and perhaps indeed I am; but there is one
service that I would beg of you before all others. You see me set here
on the top of this rock in the midst of your city. Even with what
liberty I have, I have the opportunity to see a myriad roofs, and I dare
to say, thirty leagues of sea and land. All this hostile! Under all
these roofs my enemies dwell; wherever I see the smoke of a house
rising, I must tell myself that some one sits before the chimney and
reads with joy of our reverses. Pardon me, dear friends, I know that you
must do the same, and I do not grudge at it! With you it is all
different. Show me your house, then, were it only the chimney, or, if
that be not visible, the quarter of the town in which it lies! So, when
I look all about me, I shall be able to say: '_There is one house in
which I am not quite unkindly thought of._'"

Flora stood a moment.

"It is a pretty thought," said she, "and, as far as regards Ronald and
myself, a true one. Come, I believe I can show you the very smoke out of
our chimney."

So saying, she carried me round the battlements towards the opposite or
southern side of the fortress, and indeed to a bastion almost
immediately overlooking the place of our projected flight. Th