"I expect you have fought a duel, have you not, M. le Chevalier?" he said tentatively, looking up at his tall companion. But La Vireville was silent.
"Perhaps several?" suggested the inquirer; and though he still got no answer, went on, "Were any of them here, in this wood?"
"No," said the Chouan, walking very fast. "—Now leave the subject alone, there's a good child! You will see in a moment what we have come to see. Here the wood ends, but it goes on again afterwards."
They had come, in fact, to the edge of the forest—or, rather, to an extensive clearing crossed by a deep-rutted woodland road. The émigré led the way along this for twenty yards or so, and the stopped.
There in front of them, at the end of a grass-grown avenue of larches, now swaying in all their first delicate green joy, stood the corpse of a large seventeenth century manor-house. Not decay, but violence, had slain it; it was gutted from end to end, so that with its blackened, jagged walls, its grinning rafters, and the few tall chimneys that yet stood, it looked, between those arcades of feathery mirth, like a skeleton in fairyland.
"Oh, poor house!" exclaimed Anne-Hilarion compassionately. "What has happened to it? Whose is it?"
"Mine," replied La Vireville. His mouth was rather grim.
"Is that Ker-where you lived?"
La Vireville nodded. "The Blues burnt it down two years ago. It does not look very pretty now, does it? Yet it was beautiful once."
"Oh, M. le Chevalier, you must have been very sorry!"