"But what did he say to you?" Fanny
asked. " How did he receive you when you
were presented?"

A flash of pain passed over his face, but it
was gone directly.

"Oh! his majesty did not recognise my
name. It was hardly to be expected he would;
though it is a name of note in Normandy;
and I have—well! that is worth nothing.
The Duc de Duras reminded him of a
circumstance or two, which I had almost hoped his
majesty would not have forgotten; but I
myself forgot the pressure of long years of
exile; it was no wonder he did not remember
me. He said he hoped to see me at the
Tuileries. His hopes are my laws. I go to
prepare for my departure. If his majesty
does not need my sword, I turn it into a
ploughshare at Chalabre. Ah! my friend,
I will not forget there all the agricultural
science I have learned from you!"

A gift of a hundred pounds would not have
pleased my father so much as this last speech.
He began forthwith to inquire about the
nature of the soil, &c., in a way which made
our poor M. de Chalabre shrug his shoulders
in despairing ignorance.

"Never mind!" said my father. "Rome
was not built in a day. It was a long time
before I learned all that I know now. I
was afraid I could not leave home this
autumn, but I perceive you'll need some one
to advise you about laying out the ground for
next year's crops."

So M. de Chalabre left our neighbourhood,
with the full understanding that we were to
pay him a visit in his Norman château in the
following September; nor was he content
until he had persuaded every one who had
shown him kindness to promise him a visit at
some appointed time. As for his old landlord
at the farm, the comely dame, and buxom
Susan—they, we found, were to be franked
there and back, under the pretence that the
French dairymaids had no notion of cleanliness,
any more than that the French farming
men were judges of stock; so it was
absolutely necessary to bring over some one
from England to put the affairs of the
Château Chalabre in order; and Farmer Dobson
and his wife considered the favour quite
reciprocal.

For some time we did not hear from our
friend. The war had made the post
between France and England very uncertain;
so we were obliged to wait, and we
tried to be patient; but, somehow, our
autumn visit to France was silently given
up; and my father gave us long expositions
of the disordered state of affairs in a country
which had suffered so much as France, and
lectured us severely on the folly of having
expected to hear so soon. We knew, all the
while, that the exposition was repeated to
soothe his own impatience, and that the
admonition to patience was what he felt that
he himself was needing.

At last the letter came. There was a
brave attempt at cheerfulness in it, which
nearly made me cry, more than any
complaints would have done. M. de Chalabre
had hoped to retain his commission as
Sous-Lieutenant in the Garde du Corps—a
commission signed by Louis the Sixteenth
himself, in seventeen hundred and ninety
one. But the regiment was to be remodelled
or reformed, I forget which; and M. de
Chalabre assured us that his was not
the only case where applicants had been
refused. He had then tried for a commission
in the Cent Suisses, the Gardes du Porte,
the Mousquetaires, but all were full. " Was
it not a glorious thing for France to have so
many brave sons ready to fight on the side of
honour and loyalty?" To which question
Fanny replied, " that it was a shame;" and
my father, after a grunt or two, comforted
himself by saying, " that M. de Chalabre
would have the more time to attend to his
neglected estate."

That winter was full of incidents in our
home. As it often happens when a family
has seemed stationary, and secure from
change for years, and then at last one important
event happens, another is sure to follow.
Fanny's lover returned, and they were married,
and left us alone—my father and I. Her
husband's ship was stationed in the Mediterranean,
and she was to go and live at Malta,
with some of his relations there. I knew not
if it was the agitation of parting with her,
but my father was stricken down from health
into confirmed invalidism, by a paralytic
stroke, soon after her departure; and my
interests were confined to the fluctuating
reports of a sick-room. I did not care for
the foreign intelligence which was shaking
Europe with an universal tremor. My hopes,
my fears were centred in one frail human
body—my dearly beloved, my most loving
father. I kept a letter in my pocket for days
from M. de Chalabre, unable to find the time
to decipher his French hieroglyphics; at last
I read it aloud to my poor father, rather as
a test of his power of enduring interest, than
because I was impatient to know what it
contained. The news in it was depressing
enough, as everything else seemed to be that
gloomy winter. A rich manufacturer of
Rouen had bought the Château Chalabre;
forfeited to the nation by its former possessor's
emigration. His son, M. du Fay, was
well-affected towards Louis the Eighteenth—
at least as long as his government was secure,
and promised to be stable, so as not to affect
the dyeing and selling of Turkey-red wools;
and so the natural legal consequence was,
that M. du Fay, Fils, was not to be disturbed
in his purchased and paid for property. My
father cared to hear of this disappointment
to our poor friend—cared just for one day,
and forgot all about it the next. Then came
the return from Elba—the hurrying events
of that spring—the battle of Waterloo; and