conscience had smitten
him for his compromise, he left everything he possessed to his brother,
the Marquis, including his daughter, Laure, who had just reached her
sixteenth year. With the will was a letter, begging the Marquis to
take the young demoiselle under his charge, to complete that ill-begun
and worse-conducted education, the deficiencies of which the father too
late realized, in a manner befitting her station, and to provide for
her marriage with a proper portion, as if she had been his own
daughter. The Marquis had never married himself, lacking the means to
support his rank, and it was probable that he never would marry.

The Marquis was at first minded to refuse the bequest and to disregard
the appeal, but an old retainer of the family, none other than Jean
Marteau, the elder, complying with Count Robert's dying wish, had taken
the young Countess Laure across the channel, and had quietly left her
in her uncle's care, he himself coming back to act as steward or agent
for the remaining acres of the shrunken Aumenier domain; for the
Marquis, having chosen a course and walked in it for so many years, was
not minded even for the sake of being once more the lord of Aumenier to
go back to France, since the return involved the recognition of the
powers that were.

Old Jean Marteau lived in his modest house between the village and the
chateau. And the chateau had been closed for the intervening time.
Young Jean Marteau, plodding along the familiar way, after a day full
of striking adventure and fraught with important news, instantly
noticed the light coming through the half moons in the shutters over
the windows of the chateau, as he came around a brow of the hill and
overlooked the village, the lake and the castle in the clearing. The
village was as dark as the chateau was light.

Marteau was ineffably weary. He had been without sleep for thirty-six
hours, he had ridden twenty leagues and walked--Heaven only knew how
many miles in addition. He had extricated himself from desperate
situations only by his courage, daring, and, in one or two cases, by
downright fighting, rendered necessary by his determination to acquire
accurate information for the Emperor. He had profited, not only by his
instruction in the military school, but by his campaigning, and he now
carried in his mind a disposition of the Russian forces which would be
of the utmost value to the Emperor.

The need of some rest, however, was absol