and he begged Vargrave to forward a letter from him to that effect.

Vargrave made some excuse, for he felt that nothing could be more
indelicate than such an application forwarded through his hands at such a
time; and Doltimore, who had accidentally heard De Montaigne confess that
he knew the address of Maltravers, quietly sent his letter to the
Frenchman, and, without mentioning its contents, begged him to forward
it. De Montaigne did so. Now it is very strange how slight men and
slight incidents bear on the great events of life; but that simple letter
was instrumental to a new revolution in the strange history of
Maltravers.



CHAPTER II.

QUID frustra simulacra fugacia captas?--
Quod petis est nusquam.*--OVID: _Met._ iii. 432.

* "Why, in vain, do you catch at fleeting shadows?
That which you seek is nowhere."

TO no clime dedicated to the indulgence of majestic griefs or to the soft
melancholy of regret--not to thy glaciers, or thy dark-blue lakes,
beautiful Switzerland, mother of many exiles; nor to thy fairer earth and
gentler heaven, sweet Italy,--fled the agonized Maltravers. Once, in his
wanderings, he had chanced to pass by a landscape so steeped in sullen
and desolate gloom, that it had made a powerful and uneffaced impression
upon his mind: it was amidst those swamps and morasses that formerly
surrounded the castle of Gil de Retz, the ambitious Lord, the dreaded