"I have no choice," replied Bernard de Rohan, in a bitter tone. "As you have wrongfully and unjustly made me a prisoner, I have no power of resisting whatsoever you choose to do with me." "That is talking sensibly," replied the man; "but, in the first place, if you please, we will take away all these pleasant little things from you, as I would rather have them in my hand than my throat." And he deliberately stripped the prisoner of all his weapons, to keep them, as he said, with a laugh, for his use at a future time. He then untied his arms, which were benumbed with the tight straining of the cords with which they had bound him, and saying, "I will bring you some food," he moved towards the door where his companions stood. "I want no food," replied Bernard de Rohan, gloomily; and in his heart he asked himself if any human being could find appetite to eat in such an abode as that. "You will come to it, young gentleman, you will come to it," replied the man; "before you get out, you will come to it well enough. I have seen many a one who thought of nothing else all the day long but the time for eating and drinking. Why, it was the only thing they had to do with life. They might as well have been a stone in the wall if it had not been for that." With this awful sermon upon the imprisonment that awaited him, the jailer set down the lamp he held in his hand and went away. He returned in a minute or two, however, with some food, which he placed upon the table before which the young cavalier was still standing, exactly as the other had left him. The man gave him a cold look, as if merely to see how he bore it, and then once more quitted the dungeon, turning the key in the heavy lock. Bernard de Rohan remained long in that same attitude, and filled with the same dark and melancholy thoughts. Still, still they pressed upon his brain, although he sought to banish them and to bear his condition with his usual equanimity and fortitude. He was not one ever to give way to despair where any opportunity existed for active exertion; but here he could do nothing. With his own hand he could not right himself. With his own voice he could not plead his cause. Talent or genius he might possess, but all in vain. Vigour and courage were useless. There was but one thing left--endurance; a species of courage which the very bravest do not always possess. Bernard de Rohan strove to summon it to his aid. It came but slowly, however; and, when he thought of Isabel of Brienne, his own sweet, beautiful bride, snatched from him in the very first moment that he could call her so, resolution forsook him, and in agony of heart he cast himself down upon the straw in his dungeon. Was that his bridal bed? CHAPTER X. "Now, then, have I not kept faith with you?" said a voice in the chapel.