talk to any other person. Oh! I was afraid to hear about it; but now I
have heard, I was afraid not to speak. Would it be so dreadful for you
to live here, when we could always have music and the garden? And these
woods seem pleasant, when you get acquainted. Day or night I can't get
him out of my mind. It is just as if you were shut up that way, papa. I
am afraid to be happy when any one is so wretched."

The result was, that Elizabeth's words, and not so much her words as
the state of things she contrived to make apparent by them, brought
Adolphus Montier to a clear, resistless sense of the prisoner's fate.
Over the features of that fate he was for days brooding. Now and then a
word that indicated the direction of his thinking would escape him in
his wife's hearing. Silently Pauline followed Adolphus to the end of
all this thinking. Once she walked alone along the unfrequented road
that ran between the prison and the wood, down to the sea; and she
looked at the gloomy fortress, and tried to think about it as she
should, if certain that within its walls her lot would soon be cast.

And more than once Montier walked home that way; and if it chanced that
he had his horn or his drum with him, he marched at quickstep, and
played the liveliest tunes, and emerged from the shadows of the wood
with a spirit undaunted. He had played for the prisoner, whom he had
never yet seen,--but not more for him than for himself.

One Sunday, when the little family walked out together, Adolphus and
his wife fell into a pleasant train of thought,--and when they were
together, thought and speech were generally simultaneous. As they
passed the prison,--for Adolphus had led the way to this path,--Laval
was standing in the door. They stopped to speak with him; whereat he
invited them into his quarters.