cause
to regret it; but this lawyer brother of hers had, as I understood,
offended my father by his slavish obsequiousness in days of prosperity
and his venomous enmity in the days of trouble. He had hounded on the
peasants until my family had been compelled to fly from the country, and
had afterwards aided Robespierre in his worst excesses, receiving as a
reward the castle and estate of Grosbois, which was our own. At the
fall of Robespierre he had succeeded in conciliating Barras, and through
every successive change he still managed to gain a fresh tenure of the
property. Now it appeared from his letter that the new Emperor of
France had also taken his part, though why he should befriend a man with
such a history, and what service my Republican uncle could possibly
render to him, were matters upon which I could form no opinion.

And now you will ask me, no doubt, why I should accept the invitation
of such a man--a man whom my father had always stigmatised as a usurper
and a traitor. It is easier to speak of it now than then, but the fact
was that we of the new generation felt it very irksome and difficult to
carry on the bitter quarrels of the last. To the older _emigres_ the
clock of time seemed to have stopped in the year 1792, and they remained
for ever with the loves and the hatreds of that era fixed indelibly upon
their souls. They had been burned into them by the fiery furnace
through which they had passed. But we, who had grown up upon a strange
soil, understood that the world had moved, and that new issues had
arisen. We were inclined to forget these feuds of the last generation.
France to us was no longer the murderous land of the _sans-culotte_ and
the guillotine basket; it was rather the glorious queen of war, attacked
by all and conquering all, but still so hard pressed that her scattered
sons could hear her call to arms for ever sounding in their ears. It
was that call more than my uncle's letter which was taking me over the
waters of the Channel.

For long my heart had been with my country in her struggle, and yet
while my father lived I had never dared to say so; for to him, who had
served under Conde and fought at Quiberon, it would have seemed the
blackest treason. But after his death there was no reason why I should
not return to the land of my birth, and my desire was the stronger
because Eugenie--the same Eugenie who has been thirty years my wife--was
of the same way of thinking as myse