confidence in France. Then, at the very end of 1848, the fickle
people elected this Napoleon, who was no Bonaparte, President of the
new Republic, and Europe was accorded a breathing space. At the
beginning of 1849 arrangements were made for it--military
arrangements--and the year was almost quiet.

It was in the summer of the next year, 1850, that the Marquis de
Gemosac journeyed to England. It was not his first visit to the
country. Sixty years earlier he had been hurried thither by a
frenzied mother, a little pale-faced boy, not bright or clever, but
destined to pass through days of trial and years of sorrow which the
bright and clever would scarcely have survived. For brightness must
always mean friction, while cleverness will continue to butt its
head against human limitations so long as men shall walk this earth.

He had been induced to make this journey thus, in the evening of his
days, by the Hope, hitherto vain enough, which many Frenchmen had
pursued for half a century. For he was one of those who refused to
believe that Louis XVII. had died in the prison of the Temple.

Not once, but many times, Dormer Colville laughingly denied any
responsibility in the matter.

"I will not even tell the story as it was told to me," he said to
the Marquis de Gemosac, to the Abbe Touvent and to the Comtesse de
Chantonnay, whom he met frequently enough at the house of his
cousin, Mrs. St. Pierre Lawrence, in that which is now the Province
of the Charente Inferieure. "I will not even tell you the story as
it was told to me, until one of you has seen the man. And then, if
you ask me, I will tell you. It is nothing to me, you understand.