not listen any longer. The nun's music had been a revelation of
a woman loved to frenzy; a woman so carefully hidden from the
world's eyes, so deeply buried in the bosom of the Church, that
hitherto the most ingenious and persistent efforts made by men
who brought great influence and unusual powers to bear upon the
search had failed to find her. The suspicion aroused in the
General's heart became all but a certainty with the vague
reminiscence of a sad, delicious melody, the air of _Fleuve du
Tage_. The woman he loved had played the prelude to the ballad in
a boudoir in Paris, how often! and now this nun had chosen the
song to express an exile's longing, amid the joy of those that
triumphed. Terrible sensation! To hope for the resurrection of
a lost love, to find her only to know that she was lost, to catch
a mysterious glimpse of her after five years--five years, in
which the pent-up passion, chafing in an empty life, had grown
the mightier for every fruitless effort to satisfy it!

Who has not known, at least once in his life, what it is to lose
some precious thing; and after hunting through his papers,
ransacking his memory, and turning his house upside down; after
one or two days spent in vain search, and hope, and despair;
after a prodigious expenditure of the liveliest irritation of
soul, who has not known the ineffable pleasure of finding that
all-important nothing which had come to be a king of monomania?
Very good. Now, spread that fury of search over five years; put
a woman, put a heart, put love in the place of the trifle;
transpose the monomania into the key of high passion; and,
furthermore, let the seeker be a man of ardent temper, with a
lion's heart and a leonine head and mane, a man to inspire awe
and fear in those who come in contact with him--realise this, and