It was one of the days that seems to have drawn out all summer’s beauty, whilst keeping yet faint memories of spring, and hinting in its breadth of evening shade at autumn’s mellowness. Madelon chattered all the way, but Aline’s thoughts were too busy to be distracted. She thought continually of the smouldering South and its dangers, of the thousand perils that menaced Dangeau, and of the bitter hardness of his face as he turned from her at the last. Jean Jacques let the reins fall loose after a while, and turning at his ease, slipped his arm about his wife’s waist and drew her head to his shoulder. Aline’s eyes smarted with sudden tears. Here were two happy people, here was love and home, and she out in the cold, barred out by a barrier of her own raising. Oh! if he had only looked kindly at the last!—if he had smiled, or taken her hand! They came over the brow of a little hill, and dipped towards the wooded pocket where Rancy lay, among its trees, watched from half-way up the hill by an old grey stone château, on the windows of which the setting sun shone full, showing them broken and dusty. "Who lives in the château?" asked Aline suddenly. "No one—now," returned Jean Jacques; and Madelon broke in quickly. "It was the château of the Montenay but a year ago.—Now why dost thou nudge me, Jean Jacques?—A year ago, I say, it was pillaged. Not by our own people, but by a mob from the town. They broke the windows and the furniture, and hunted high and low for traitors, and then went back again to where they came from. There was nobody there, so not much harm done." "De Montenay?" said Aline in a low voice. How strange! So this was why the name of Rancy had seemed familiar from the first. They were of her kin, the De Montenay. "Yes, the De Montenay," said Madelon, nodding. "They were great folk once, and now there is only the old Marquise left, and she has emigrated. She is very old now, but do you know they say the De Montenay can only die here? However ill they are in a foreign place, the spirit cannot pass, and I always wonder will the old Marquise come back, for she is a Montenay by birth as well as by marriage?" "Eh, Madelon, how you talk!" said Jean Jacques, with an uneasy lift of his floury shoulders. He picked up the reins and flicked the mare’s plump sides with a "Come up, Suzette; it grows late." Madelon tossed her head. "It is true, all the same," she protested. "Why, there was M. Réné,—all the world knows how she brought M. Réné here to die." "Chut then, Madelon!" said the miller, in a decided tone this time; and, as she pouted, he spoke over his shoulder in a low voice, and Aline caught the words, "Ma’mselle Ange," whereon Madelon promptly echoed "Ma’mselle" with a teasing inflexion. Jean Jacques became angry, and the back of his neck seemed to well over the collar of his blouse, turning very red as it did so.