"MOTHER!" cried Roy, bursting into the sitting-room at Fontainebleau, one wintry day. "Ma'am—what do you think?"
Roy by this time was quite recovered from his illness, though his face carried traces of it in the shape of several small red pits, which had not yet had time to lose their prominence. He was still small and childish for his years,—a good-looking lad, but for those disfiguring marks. His eyes sparkled with excitement. Ivor, who happened to be in the background, made a silencing gesture, but Roy was too eager to notice it.
"Only think! All of us are ordered off to Verdun! Why, that is where Mademoiselle de St. Roques lives. We shall see her again. I shall like that, but 'tis horrid having to go further away from home. Everybody says what a beastly shame it is. It's a fortified town, and we prisoners are to be in stricter keeping."
Roy liked to speak of himself as a prisoner, even while he chafed furiously against the restraints of imprisonment. He objected to the indignity of being counted so young as not to be worth detention. "I am quite as old as lots of middies," he would declare. "And only two or three years younger than General Moore when he began to be a soldier." This assertion generally brought laughter, for nobody ever guessed Roy at thirteen to be more than ten or eleven.
"You should not startle your mother, Roy," the Colonel said gravely, as Mrs. Baron's eyes grew wide and terrified. "You should have waited until I spoke."
Roy began to see, too late, the nature of his blunder.
"I'm sorry, sir. But shall we go by diligence or poste, or will you have a carriage?"
"A carriage, probably, for your mother and Den and myself."
The words were said deliberately. Colonel Baron had made up his mind in that moment to take the bull by the horns. Delay now would be useless.
"And me, sir?"