discovered by her father, the poor child's remorse for her act of disobedience, as she regarded it, caused her to pause more than once, undecided whether to keep her tacit promise, or to creep back swiftly to her chamber. Before she could adopt the course dictated by prudence and submission to her father's will, she heard a light step behind her, and in another instant she was clasped in her lover's arms. Gently releasing herself, she placed her hand in his, and led him to a low bench close by, under the shadow of a tree. Seated side by side, they spoke in low whispers of their approaching separation and of their mutual sorrow during Maurice's long absence from France. They talked of their occupations, and of the expedients each would adopt to make the time seem less wearisome. They arranged the employment of every day, and fixed the hours when each should breathe the other's name, and thus know that they were in communion of thought, though thousands of miles of ocean rolled between them, forgetting that in widely different climes the day to one would be night to the other. Then, perhaps, this geographical obstacle occurred to them, and they triumphantly vanquished it by promising to think of each other always, awake by day and in dreams by night, which would be the surest method of never being absent for an instant from each other's meditations.
In these lover-like communings the night sped quickly, and over the tree-tops came the silver streaks in the clouds which herald the approach of dawn. They knew that their remaining time must now be short, and for a while they spoke no words. Still they sat side by side upon the bench, Maurice holding Gabrielle's hand folded within his own. Motionless, and with her head leaning forward, she wept in silence, tears of mingled joy and anguish. Maurice felt a strange thrill of rapture in his heart as he gazed in the sweet face of his beautiful betrothed, illumined by the soft rays of the moon, and as if seized with a sudden impulse, he fell upon his knees before her.
"Do you love me, dearest?" he murmured in trembling accents.
"God is my witness," she answered gently, "that I love you better than aught else on earth."
As if startled by the danger of discovery to which they were becoming every instant more and more exposed, the young man sprang hastily to his feet, clasped her in his arms, and kissed her passionately.
"Farewell, my own true love," he said softly. "Farewell until we meet again."
"Must you then leave me?"
"Alas, yes!"
She feared that her own gentleness and calmness at the supreme moment of parting would seem cold and tame in contrast with his exaltation, and, throwing her arms around his neck, she cried—
"Kiss me once more, Maurice; once more!"
Again he pressed his burning lips to hers in one long, last embrace.
"Farewell, Maurice," she sighed. "I feel that, if I were in my shroud, your kiss would recall me back to life!"
And with these prophetic words ringing strangely in his ears, he turned, and fled from her presence.
III.
Four long and eventful years had passed since the lovers' clandestine parting, when Captain de Serres again set foot on the soil of his native land. The transport which brought a portion of his regiment home entered the harbour of Brest early one bright morning in June, and Maurice the same day set out for Paris, his first thought being to embrace his widowed mother, whom he idolised. He had taken the precaution to send her previous intelligence of his return to France, and of his safety, for the poor lady, during nearly two years, had mourned her only son as dead. Of his betrothal to Mademoiselle de Launay she had never known, though she knew of the President by name as one of her late husband's early friends.
When Maurice arrived in Paris, on the second morning after his departure from Brest, and it was vouchsafed to his mother to clasp in her arms the son she had thought gone from her for ever, her joy can only be pictured by those to whom it has been given to taste an unhoped-for happiness. Maurice, too, was happy; but still, after the first emotions of such a meeting, Madame de Serres' keenly observant glance detected in her son's face a strange expression of melancholy, and an air of abstraction in his replies to her anxious questions, which at once aroused all her solicitude. Alarmed at his singular demeanour, she tenderly pressed him to confide to her the cause of his sadness, that she might at least attempt to soothe and console him.
