"So perished my dear brother Claude, and with him my friend Cecile.
"Lucrece stood there for a time like one bewildered and aghast, for the whole episode resembled a sudden and ghastly dream, from which she might yet awaken. She saw only the river foaming past like a white flood amid the blackening gloom, and its roar seemed deafening and stunning, and she placed her hands on her ears to shut out the sound, as she went slowly home, and for days and nights the roar of the river seemed never to leave her. From that hour she was quite insane, and, if still alive, is an inmate of the lunatic asylum at Beaujeu.
"This double catastrophe had such an effect upon my spirits that, after the death of my father, by the advice of monsieur le curé, I quitted the Château de Chaverondier, joined the order to which I now belong, and was soon after sent hither with the army of the East."
Such, as nearly as I can remember, was the sad story of her early life told me by Mademoiselle Chaverondier.
It was not until I began to recover that I became fully aware of the vast debt of gratitude I owed to this good sister of charity, and that I completely knew how much I owed to her sisterly and motherly care of me during that perilous and loathsome disease.
But there were no means of repaying her. Gratitude of the heart was all she would accept, and that I gave her to the full, but now daily, as I became convalescent, and as my brother officers cantered over from the vale of Aladyn to visit me, she left me more and more alone, and there were three whole days during which she never came at all.
I rather think she was scared by Studhome, who had ridden over with a couple of champagne bottles in his holsters, and whom she found smoking in my kiosk, with his shell-jacket open, and his stock off, and singing a song, the first verse of which was something in this style—
My father cared little for shot or shell,
He laughed at death and dangers;
He'd have stormed the very gates of hell,
At the head of the Connaught Rangers.
How much I missed her!
When she did return it was to bid me adieu, and to say that she had been ordered to attach herself to the 45th regiment of the French line, where severe duties awaited her, and that in all human probability I should never see her more.