reside in France. She was fond of travel, and
moved yearly from London to Naples, Naples to Vienna, Berlin, Madrid,
Seville, Carlsbad, Baden-Baden,--anywhere for caprice or change, except
Paris. This fair wanderer succeeded in chaining to herself the heart and
the steps of the Marquis de Rochebriant.

She was very rich; she lived semi-royally. Hers was just the house in
which it suited the Marquis to be the 'enfant qate.' I suspect that,
cat-like, his attachment was rather to the house than to the person of
his mistress. Not that he was domiciled with the Princess; that would
have been somewhat too much against the proprieties, greatly too
much against the Marquis's notions of his own dignity. He had his
own carriage, his own apartments, his own suite, as became so grand a
seigneur and the lover of so grand a dame. His estates, mortgaged
before he came to them, yielded no income sufficient for his wants; he
mortgaged deeper and deeper, year after year, till he could mortgage
them no more. He sold his hotel at Paris; he accepted without scruple
his sister's fortune; he borrowed with equal 'sang froid' the two
hundred thousand francs which his son on coming of age inherited from
his mother. Alain yielded that fortune to him without a murmur,--nay,
with pride; he thought it destined to go towards raising a regiment for
the fleur-de-lis.

To do the Marquis justice, he was fully persuaded that he should shortly
restore to his sister and son what he so recklessly took from them. He
was engaged to be married to his Princess so soon as her own husband
died. She had been separated from the Prince for many years, and every
year it was said he could not last a year longer. But he completed the
measure of his conjugal iniquities by continuing to live; and one day,
by mistake, Death robbed the lady of the Marquis instead of the Prince.

This was an accident which the Marquis had never counted upon. He was
still young enough to consider himself young; in fact, one principal
reason for keeping Alain secluded in Bretagne was his reluctance
to introduce into the world a son "as old as myself" he would say
pathetically. The news of his death, which happened at Baden after a
short attack of bronchitis caught in a supper 'al fresco' at the old
castle, was duly transmitted to Rochebriant by the Princess; and the
shock to Alain and his aunt was the greater because they had seen so
little of the departed that they regarded him as a heroic m