“Good morning, citizen,” answered the Marquis in a voice feeble from weakness and long silence. “Can I get some food here?” “If you can pay for it, citizen.” “Yes, I can pay.” The boy straightened himself and looked at the wild and miserable figure advancing towards him. “Who are you, citizen?” he asked, and the Marquis saw suspicion creep into his common dull face. “I am a servant looking for a place; my last was in Paris–I have walked a long way–I mean to get to Bourg-la-Reine to-night.” “Well, it is not far,” answered the peasant with an instant insolence of the poor towards the ragged. “I must have breakfast first,” said the Marquis, putting a great restraint on himself to speak gently and humbly; it was natural to him to be brief and cold with his inferiors. The youth jerked his head towards the open door. The Marquis entered the low dark passage and stepped into the common parlour in the front, which was roughly furnished but filled with beauty by the chestnut tree that pressed its load of young clear green leaves against the panes of the small low window. The Marquis sank on to a chair by this window, with his back to the light and rested his elbows on the stained table in front of him. The woman whom he had seen with the pail entered, wiping her hands on her rough blue apron; she did not appear to notice his desperate appearance; the light was not good and probably she was used enough to wild and haggard figures stopping here for a moment’s respite on some bitter journey. He asked her briefly for food; she nodded and looked at him, not unkindly. Few indeed could have looked at him unmoved, so obviously had everything left him save mere fainting humanity that cried for succour. “You are hungry?” she said. He answered her with an effort; repeated his story of a servant out of place. “What became of your master?” she asked. “Dead,” he replied, hardly knowing what he said. “The guillotine—” “Ah, the guillotine–he was, then, an aristocrat?” She put bread, cheese and a bottle of wine on the table, having taken them from a cupboard in the wall. “Do aristocrats only go to the guillotine?” he replied, while his hand went out to the bread. “No, there are no longer any aristocrats, and now we execute the good republicans, citizeness.” “Yes,” she answered; “but you spoke as if you had lived with aristocrats, citizen.” The Marquis shuddered: so she had noticed it, this stupid woman; his speech stamped him, he could not disguise that. “I was in a good place,” he said. She left him, and he began eating and drinking, not thinking for the moment of anything but that, the gratification of his necessity. He ate all the bread and cheese she had brought him before he dare touch the wine; when he did drink it, poor and thin as it was, it restored his blood to nearer its normal beat and heat; his brain began to work more clearly and sanely, his strong intelligence reasserted its sway; he began to form plans, to make resolves.