“Neither were Mrs. Strong and Mary backward in their demonstrations of friendship and esteem for the woman who had suffered so much since the day, years and years before, when she had left her home in Millfield and returned no more. Could the inmates of the red house have blotted from their minds the memory of the poor lunatic who, not many miles away, was chafing and raging like a newly-caged animal, they would have been very happy these last summer days; and, to a certain degree, they were happy, though, in her low, nervous state Anna could never quite put from her mind the fear lest her dreaded husband should by some means escape from his confinement and come to do her harm. But the bolts and bars were very strong which held him, else he might perhaps have escaped, for he seemed endowed with superhuman strength, and clutched savagely at the iron gratings of his cell, shaking them at times as if they were but dried twigs in his hands. “He was terrible in his insanity, and only his keeper and physician ever ventured near him. At them he sprang and snapped viciously, like a dog chained to a post, while he filled the room with the most horrid oaths, cursing Madame Verwest, who had dared to call him her child. “‘He who was highly born, the son of a gentleman, the child of a servant, a nurse, a Yankee, and illegitimate at that; curse her! curse her! she lies! she lies! she played me false, and I hate her!’ he would scream, when his mother was the subject of his thoughts. “Again, when it was Eugenie, he grew, if possible, more desperate than before, and would utter such oaths that even his keeper, hardened as he was by similar scenes, fled from the hearing of the blasphemous words. “Of Anna and Agatha he never spoke until toward the last, when, as if he had worn his fierce nature out, he grew more quiet, and would sit for hours perfectly still, with his head bowed upon his hands, intently brooding over something in the past. Was he thinking of Agatha, and the cottage far away in Normandy, where he first saw her singing in the sunshine, with the sweet, shy look of innocence in her soft eyes, or did she come up before him as he last looked upon her, cold, white, and dead in her coffin, ruined by him, who had used every act in his power to lure her into the snare. It would seem that she came to him in both phases, for at times he would smile faintly and whisper, very soft and low: “‘_Ma petite, ma cherie. Venez avec moi a Paris. Je vous aime bien_.’ “To her he always spoke in French and with the utmost tenderness, saying to her, as he thought himself bending over her coffin: