"And the Duchess?" said the Englishman at length, after a pause, "at
Frohsdorf--what does she say--or think?"

"She says nothing," replied the Marquis de Gemosac, sharply. "She
is silent, because the world is listening for every word she may
utter. What she thinks . . . . Ah! who knows? She is an old woman,
my friend, for she is seventy-one. Her memories are a millstone
about her neck. No wonder she is silent. Think what her life has
been. As a child, three years of semi-captivity at the Tuileries,
with the mob howling round the railings. Three and a half years a
prisoner in the Temple. Both parents sent to the guillotine--her
aunt to the same. All her world--massacred. As a girl, she was
collected, majestic; or else she could not have survived those years
in the Temple, alone--the last of her family. What must her
thoughts have been, at night in her prison? As a woman, she is
cold, sad, unemotional. No one ever lived through such troubles
with so little display of feeling. The Restoration, the Hundred
Days, the second Restoration, Louis XVIII., and his flight to
England; Charles X. and his abdication; her own husband, the Duc
d'Angouleme--the Dauphin for many years, the King for half an hour--
these are some of her experiences. She has lived for forty years in
exile in Mittau, Memel, Warsaw, Konigsberg, Prague, England; and now
she is at Frohsdorf, awaiting the end. You ask me what she says?
She says nothing, but she knows--she has always known--that her
brother did not die in the Temple."

"Then--" suggested Colville, who certainly had acquired the French
art of putting much meaning into one word.

"Then why not seek him? you would ask. How do you know that she has