“Your son-in-law, dame, whom I met half an hour or so ago, requested me to call here; he wishes me to join his craft.”
“Ah!” said the dame, with a serious and changed expression of countenance; “then take an old woman’s advice—be an honest seaman, and leave privateering alone. Your face and your voice, young man, raise strange thoughts of the past in my mind. What is your name, and where do you come from?”
Julian looked round; the dame and he were alone, for the servant girl had followed Rose from the kitchen.
“My name, dame,” said Julian, in a low voice; “does no recollection of Julian Arden——”
“Ah! mon Dieu! mon Dieu!” exclaimed the old woman, clasping her hands, and thereby letting the tureen drop to the floor, where it was shattered to pieces; and then, throwing her arms round his neck, she kissed him, as she often had done before, with all the warm affection of a mother.
“Ah, Dame Moret! Dame Moret!” said Julian, looking affectionately at his old nurse, “how vividly the past comes through the brain; it seems as yesterday that I stood here, and romped through the dear old building with your three girls.”
“Hush! some one is coming,” said Dame Moret.
“Recollect—I am Louis Lebeau, of Rouen, a sailor.”
He had hardly time to say more, when the clank of a steel sheath holding a sword struck against the pavement without, and the next instant two gendarmes, with their cocked hats, entered the kitchen.
Dame Moret was stooping down, carefully picking up the fragments of the soup-tureen, whilst Julian, carelessly whistling an air, took a short pipe from his pocket, and walked to the fire to light it.