Yet still he pleaded, repeating all that Laure had that day said of her and telling of how she had declared that she could never go away unless Marion came too; and, finally, he won. He won so far that, at last, she consented to return to Laure, even though it were but to say farewell to her and then go forth into oblivion for ever.
Yet now she was in the bilander with them, on her way to England to pass the rest of her life in peace. How could she have refused--how!--when the girl wept tears of joy in her arms and murmured that, since she had her husband and Marion by her side, she asked for nothing else? And so the ship went on and on, bearing those in her to freedom and to peace. To a peace and contentment that Laure had never dreamed could come to her again; to a happiness which once Walter Clarges had never dared to hope should at last be his.
FOOTNOTES
[Footnote 1]: This street served as the Bourse of the period.
[Footnote 2]: "Archers" were servants of the Provost Marshals and of a position between gendarmes and policemen, but in the service of the prisons. "Exempts" were a kind of Sheriff's officer.
[Footnote 3]: A slang name for the scaffold.
[Footnote 4]: The total number of deaths in Provence was finally estimated to be 148,000. Aix and Toulon suffered the worst after Marseilles.