as for force or stratagem--might not any indiscretion cost him
his position, his whole career as a soldier, and the end in view
to boot? The Duc d'Angouleme was still in Spain; and of all the
crimes which a man in favour with the Commander-in-Chief might
commit, this one alone was certain to find him inexorable. The
General had asked for the mission to gratify private motives of
curiosity, though never was curiosity more hopeless. This final
attempt was a matter of conscience. The Carmelite convent on the
island was the only nunnery in Spain which had baffled his
search.

As he crossed from the mainland, scarcely an hour's distance, he
felt a presentiment that his hopes were to be fulfilled; and
afterwards, when as yet he had seen nothing of the convent but
its walls, and of the nuns not so much as their robes; while he
had merely heard the chanting of the service, there were dim
auguries under the walls and in the sound of the voices to
justify his frail hope. And, indeed, however faint those so
unaccountable presentiments might be, never was human passion
more vehemently excited than the General's curiosity at that
moment. There are no small events for the heart; the heart
exaggerates everything; the heart weighs the fall of a
fourteen-year-old Empire and the dropping of a woman's glove in
the same scales, and the glove is nearly always the heavier of
the two. So here are the facts in all their prosaic simplicity.
The facts first, the emotions will follow.

An hour after the General landed on the island, the royal
authority was re-established there. Some few Constitutional
Spaniards who had found their way thither after the fall of Cadiz