"This is indeed an unlooked-for happiness!" passionately exclaimed Alphonse, while he placed the agitated and almost fainting girl on a seat. "Since that memorable night of mingled joy and despair, I thought not that such rapture awaited me again on earth."
"Oh, talk not of joy, of happiness!" imploringly exclaimed the young girl. "I have come to you on a mission of life or death. My father—my dear, my beloved father—is a prisoner, and condemned to be shot. Oh, save him! save him!" she cried wildly, falling on her knees.—"If you have hearts, if you are human—save him! and God will reward you for it; and I shall live but to bless your names every hour of my existence." Exhausted by her emotion, she would have fallen on the ground, had not Alphonse caught her and raised her in his arms.
"Calm yourself, calm yourself, sweet child!" he whispered soothingly: "our lives, our blood is at your service; there is nothing on earth which my friend and I would not do for you."
A declaration which De Lucenay confirmed with an energetic oath.
Somewhat tranquillized by this assurance, she at last recovered sufficiently to explain that her father was at the head of a guerilla band which had been captured, having fallen into an ambuscade, where they left more than half their number dead on the field. Some peasants had brought the news to the chateau, with the additional information that they were all to be shot within two days.
"In my despair," continued the young girl, "I thought of you; and ordering the fleetest horses in the stables to be saddled, set off with two servants, determined to throw myself on your pity; and if that should fail me, to fling myself on the mercy of heaven, and lastly to die with him, if I could not rescue him. But you will save him! will you not?" she sobbed with clasped hands—and a look so beseeching, so sorrowful, that the tears rushed involuntarily into their eyes.
"Save him! oh yes, at all costs, at all hazards! were it at the risk of our heads! But where is he? where was he taken? where conveyed to?"
"They were taken to the quarters of the general-in-chief in command, and it was he himself who signed their condemnation."
"My father!" said De Lucenay, in a tone of surprise.
"Ernest!" exclaimed his friend, "they must be those prisoners who were brought in this morning while we were out foraging."