"No, Monsieur, I started across this morning and it broke."
"Of what nature is it?"
"Soft, and bends, and your foot sinks through it."
"Very well, we can cross it."
He hurried back to one of the chambers where there were some of the de Bailleul portraits hanging, pulled them down with his own hands, and tore the frames of several apart. Their sides he attached as cross-bars to others, by means of strings ravelled from the canvas of the tapestries. The result was a makeshift for snowshoes. With these they escaped across the ice to the park, unnoticed by their enemies, who, by the lights in every part of the mansion, they could see were active and uproarious.
When at last, arriving at the gate of a château miles onward toward Paris they looked back they saw an immense blaze in the distance, and the heavens aglare from east to west with the conflagration. But the saving of Cyrène made up in Germain's heart for the loss of his mansion, and he felt as if by that as he had taken a step towards redemption.
[CHAPTER XLV]
THE NECESSITIES OF CONDITION
All through the long illness of Cyrène, which followed the revolt at Eaux Tranquilles, and especially after her first grief for the misguided men who had fallen in the corridor, her heart dwelt with great intensity on the destruction of her hope of a home. She recurred to it again and again in her conversations with him, until he ventured to mention to her the offer once made to him by Liancourt of the position of Commandant of the cadet school on his estates.
"Could you retire thither," said he, looking into her eyes with emotion, "away for ever from your friends, away from your rank, from the Court, and all that is so brilliant and belongs to you, to live your life along with a man of humble birth wholly unworthy of you? You speak of a quiet hearth and of abandonment of the world, but could you make a sacrifice so great as this?"