and that I ought to know him; for the features all seemed
familiar, although had it been to save my life, I could not have said
where I had met him.

I was torturing my memory on this head in vain--for he was evidently an
Englishman, and I had no acquaintance with any English officer--when he
rode past a second time, and seemed to be engaged in endeavouring to
decipher the arms on our carriage, and his object appeared to be the
discovery of who _I_ was; at least, I could not but observe that he
looked at me from time to time with a furtive glance from under the brim
of his hat, as if he, too, fancied that he knew or remembered me. The
same thing happened yet a third time; and then he called his servant to
his side, and I saw the man ride up a second afterwards to Judge
Selwyn's footman, who was standing at a few yards' distance from the
carriage, and ask him some question, which he answered by a word or two,
when the groom rode away.

The gentleman, on receiving the reply, nodded his head quietly, as if he
would have said, "I thought so," and then he looked at me steadily till
he caught my eye, when he raised his hat, made a half military bow, and
trotted slowly away.

Caroline's quick eye caught this action in an instant, and, turning to
me suddenly, she cried quickly--

"Ah! Valerie, who is that? that handsome man who bowed to you?--Where
have I seen him before?"

"The very question which I was asking myself, Caroline. I am quite sure
that I have seen his face, and yet I cannot remember where. It is very
strange."

"Very!" replied a strange, sneering voice, close to my ear, with a
slightly foreign accent. "Can you say where you have seen mine,
_Ingrate_?"

I turned my head as quick as lightning; for in answering Caroline, who
sat on the side of the carriage next to the military spectacle, I had
leaned a little inward; and there, with his effeminate features actually
livid with rage, and writhing with impotent malignity, stood Monsieur
G--, the infamous divorced husband of Madame d'Albret, and the first
cause of almost all my misfortunes.

I looked at him steadily, and replied with bitter but calm contempt--

"Perfectly well, Monsieur G--. And very little did I suppose that I
should ever see it again. I imagined, sir, that you were in your proper
place,--the galleys!"

It was wrong, doubtless, in me so to answer him--unfeminine, perhaps,
and too provocative of insult; but the blood of my race is hot