"Not as the leaves die when the summer is over; for she was torn from me by the hands of the accursed Iroquois—my beloved Mary! After the lapse of one and twenty years, baron, her image, so noble, so gentle, and so womanly, fills up my past, as once it filled my future. I was taken prisoner, as you know, and joining the French army in sheer disgust of the British, whose conduct, under Webb, maddened me, I have attained in India the rank I now bear, and which I never could have won in the armies of the House of Hanover."
"Stay—peste! a sudden light breaks in upon me!" exclaimed the baron, smiting his forehead; "ah, mon Dieu! mon Dieu! if it should be!"
"What?"
"Excuse me, messieurs, for one moment; a thought has struck me!" said the impulsive Frenchman, and rushing into the house, he returned in a few moments, bearing in his hands an antique oak casquet, in which he kept his commissions, his diplomas, orders of knighthood, and other objects of value; and, drawing therefrom the brooch which had been found upon the dress of Therese when a child, he placed it in the hands of the count.
As Roderick MacGillivray, now M. le Comte d'Arcot, Governor of Pondicherry, Maréchal du Camp, and Colonel of the Regiment du Roi, a man grown old by war and thought and time, saw the ancient and well-known heirloom of his house—the marriage-brooch of the brides of Glenarrow—the same mystic symbol which, in youth, he had bestowed upon his wife, a sudden tremor came over him, and a flush and then a pallor crossed his wrinkled face.
"Lochmoy!" he muttered in his native language, which he had so long unused; "touch not the cat without the glove. Oh my God! whence came this trinket, Beauchatel?"
"I found it fastened to the dress of a newly-born babe in the forest near Lake George—a babe that lay on the breast of its dead mother, in the wigwam of an Iroquois, and on her finger was this ring, inscribed—"
"Roderaick Ruodh MacGillibhreac—my own name, and my gift it was to Mary, the grand-daughter of the murdered MacIan of Glencoe," exclaimed MacGillivray, in an agonized voice, as his eyes filled with tears; "and you buried her—"
"By my own hands, at the foot of a tree, which I marked with a cross—"
"God bless thee, my brave and honest Beauchatel!" exclaimed Roderick.