"'If you come again up here, m'sieu, you will be the first visitor the Nid de l'Aigle has seen for four years,' said old Cazot, as she showed me out through the dusky-vaulted passage. She was a cheerful, garrulous old woman, strong in her devotion to the De l'Heris of the bygone past; stronger even yet in her love for their single orphan representative of the beggared present. 'Visitors! Is it likely we should have any, m'sieu? Those that would suit me would be bad company for Ma'amselle Florelle, and those that should seek her never do. I recollect the time, m'sieu, when the highest in all the departments were glad to come to the bidding of a De l'Heris; but generations have gone since then, and lands and gold gone too, and, if you cannot feast them, what care people for you? That is true in the Pyrenees, m'sieu, as well as in the rest of the world. I have not lived eighty years without finding out that. If my child yonder were the heiress of the De l'Heris, there would be plenty to court and seek her; but she lives in these poor broken-down ruins with me, an old peasant woman, to care for her as best I can, and not a soul takes heed of her save the holy women at the convent, where, maybe, she will seek refuge at last!' "She let me out at the gate where I had thundered for admittance two hours before, and, giving her my thanks for her hospitality--money she would not take--I wished her good day, and rode down the bridle-path to St. Sauveur, and onwards to Luz, thinking at intervals of that fair young life that had just sprung up, and was already destined to wither away its bloom in a convent. Any destiny would be better to proffer to her than that. She interested me already by her childlike loveliness and her strange solitude of position, and I thought she would while away some of the long summer hours during my stay in the Midi when I was tired of chamois and palette, and my lazy dolce under the beech-wood shades. At any rate, she was newer and more charming than the belles of Eaux Bonnes.