pair
them, Marthe: give me my dressing-gown, and good-night."

"'Bon repos, M. le Marquis! beaux reves, et bel avenir.'"

"'Bel avenir!'" murmured the young man, bitterly, leaning his cheek
on his hand; "what fortune fairer than the present can be mine? yet
inaction in youth is more keenly felt than in age. How lightly I
should endure poverty if it brought poverty's ennobling companion,
Labour,--denied to me! Well, well; I must go back to the old rock: on
this ocean there is no sail, not even an oar, for me."

Alain de Rochebriant had not been reared to the expectation of poverty.
The only son of a father whose estates were large beyond those of most
nobles in modern France, his destined heritage seemed not unsuitable
to his illustrious birth. Educated at a provincial academy, he had been
removed at the age of sixteen to Rochebriant, and lived there simply and
lonelily enough, but still in a sort of feudal state, with an aunt, an
elder and unmarried sister to his father.

His father he never saw but twice after leaving college. That brilliant
seigneur visited France but rarely, for very brief intervals, residing
wholly abroad. To him went all the revenues of Rochebriant save what
sufficed for the manage of his son and his sister. It was the cherished
belief of these two loyal natures that the Marquis secretly devoted his
fortune to the cause of the Bourbons; how, they knew not, though they
often amused themselves by conjecturing: and, the young man, as he grew
up, nursed the hope that he should soon hear that the descendant of
Henri Quatre had crossed the frontier on a white charger and hoisted the
old gonfalon with its 'fleur-de-lis.' Then, indeed, his own career would
be opened, and the sword of the Kerouecs drawn from its sheath. Day
after day he expected to hear of revolts, of which his noble father was
doubtless the soul. But the Marquis, though a sincere Legitimist, was
by no means an enthusiastic fanatic. He was simply a very proud, a very
polished, a very luxurious, and, though not without the kindliness and
generosity which were common attributes of the old French noblesse, a
very selfish grand seigneur.

Losing his wife (who died the first year of marriage in giving birth to
Alain) while he was yet very young, he had lived a frank libertine life
until he fell submissive under the despotic yoke of a Russian Princess,
who, for some mysterious reason, never visited her own country and
obstinately refused to