"Is this so pleasant a camp that you grudge me my marching orders?" he asked; and as they passed he looked back a moment and said, "Adieu, Mademoiselle."
She gave him back the word very low, and he smiled again, a smile that irradiated his rough features and steady brown eyes. "Indeed, I think I go to 'Him,'" he said, and was gone.
Aline steadied herself against the wall, and closed her eyes for a moment. She had conceived a sincere liking for the young soldier; Cléry had done her a service, and now both were gone, and she still left. And yet she knew that Hébert was loose again. When she had first heard of his release she spent days of shuddering apprehension, but as the time went on she began to entertain a trembling hope that she was forgotten, as happened to more than one prisoner in those days.
Hébert was loose again, but, for a time at least, with hands too full of public matters, and brain too occupied with the struggle for existence, to concern himself with matters of private pleasure or revenge.
It was the middle of June before he thought seriously of Mlle de Rochambeau.
"Dangeau is returning," said Danton one morning, and Hébert's dormant spite woke again into full activity.
At the Abbaye, the hot afternoon waned; a drowsy stillness fell upon its inmates. Mme de Matigny dozed a little. She had grown older in the past few weeks, but her glance was still piercing, and she woke at intervals with a start, and let it rest sharply upon her little circle, as if forbidding them to be aware of Juno nodding.
Marguerite and Aline sat together: Aline half asleep with her head in her friend's lap, for Mme de Coigny's baby had died at dawn, and she had been up all night tending it, and now fatigue had its way with her.
Suddenly a turnkey stumbled in. He had been drinking, and stood blinking a moment as, coming from the dark corridor, he met the level sunlight full. Then he called Mlle de Rochambeau's name, and as she awoke with a sense of startled amazement Marguerite flung soft arms about her.
"Ah, ma mie, ma belle, ma bien aimée!" she cried, sobbing.