son Barebone saw on entering the room was Juliette,
standing under the spreading arms of a chandelier, half turned to look
at him--Juliette, in all the freshness of her girlhood and her first
evening dress, flushing pink and white like a wild rose, her eyes,
bright with a sudden excitement, seeking his.

Behind her, the Marquis de Gemosac, Albert de Chantonnay, his mother,
and all the Royalists of the province, gathered in a semicircle, by
accident or some tacit instinct, leaving only the girl standing out
in front, beneath the chandelier. They bowed with that grave
self-possession which falls like a cloak over the shoulders of such as
are of ancient and historic lineage.

"We reached the chateau of Gemosac only a few minutes after Monsieur
le Marquis and Mademoiselle had quitted it to come here," Barebone
explained to Madame de Chantonnay; "and trusting to the good-nature--so
widely famed--of Madame la Comtesse, we hurriedly removed the dust of
travel, and took the liberty of following them hither."

"You have not taken me by surprise," replied Madame de Chantonnay. "I
expected you. Ask the Abbe Touvent. He will tell you, gentlemen, that I
expected you."

As Barebone turned away to speak to the Marquis and others, who were
pressing forward to greet him, it became apparent that that mantle of
imperturbability, which millions made in trade can never buy, had fallen
upon his shoulders, too. For most men are, in the end, forced to play
the part the world assigns to them. We are not allowed to remain what we
know ourselves to be, but must, at last, be that which the world thinks
us.

Madame de Chantonnay, murmuring to a neighbour a mystic reference to her
heart and its voluminous premonitions, watched him depart with a vague
surprise.

"Mon Dieu! mon Dieu!" she whispered, breathlessly. "It is not a
resemblance. It is the dead come to life again."

CHAPTER XXXII. PRIMROSES

"If I go on, I go alone," Barebone had once said to Dormer Colville. The
words, spoken in the heat of a quarrel, stuck in the memory of both,
as such are wont to do. Perhaps, in moments of anger or
disillusionment--when we find that neither self nor friend is what we
thought--the heart tears itself away from the grip of the cooler, calmer
brain and speaks untrammelled. And such speeches are apt to linger in
the mind long after the most brilliant jeu d'esprit has been forgotten.

What occupies the thoughts of the old man, sitting out the