The prisoner reached the prison door in the dead of night and trying
to noiselessly turn the key in a pitiless lock, was never more timidly
bold.

When the countess had succeeded in rising to her seat without
awakening her keeper, she made a gesture of childlike joy which
revealed the touching naivete of her nature. But the half-formed smile
on her burning lips was quickly suppressed; a thought came to darken
that pure brow, and her long blue eyes resumed their sad expression.
She gave a sigh and again laid her hands, not without precaution, on
the fatal conjugal pillow. Then--as if for the first time since her
marriage she found herself free in thought and action--she looked at
the things around her, stretching out her neck with little darting
motions like those of a bird in its cage. Seeing her thus, it was easy
to divine that she had once been all gaiety and light-heartedness, but
that fate had suddenly mown down her hopes, and changed her ingenuous
gaiety to sadness.

The chamber was one of those which, to this day octogenarian porters
of old chateaus point out to visitors as "the state bedroom where
Louis XIII. once slept." Fine pictures, mostly brown in tone, were
framed in walnut, the delicate carvings of which were blackened by
time. The rafters of the ceiling formed compartments adorned with
arabesques in the style of the preceding century, which preserved the
colors of the chestnut wood. These decorations, severe in tone,
reflected the light so little that it was difficult to see their
designs, even when the sun shone full into that long and wide and
lofty chamber. The silver lamp, placed upon the mantel of the vast
fireplace, lighted the room so feebly that its quivering gleam could
be compared only to the nebulous stars which appear at moments through