Inspired by just indignation, and determined to unravel this terrible mystery, the Duke of Dorset took him in a fiacre to the hotel of the Comte de Montmorin, the only minister then in Paris, to demand the reason of this outrage upon the laws of war, of peace, and of common humanity; but the official of the unfortunate Louis could only shrug his shoulders, make the usual grimaces and apologies, and plead, that as the records of the Bastille had perished in the sack of that prison, it was totally beyond his power to explain the affair; for not a scrap of paper remained to show how or why this brave officer of the Black Watch, who had been wounded and taken prisoner in action in 1758, should have been found in that dreadful place thirty-one years after. The Duke of Dorset perceived, with surprise, that while speaking the Comte de Montmorin was ghastly pale, and that his eyes were filled with terror. It would have made a fine subject for a painter, but a finer still for a novelist--the delineation of this interview, as it took place in the drawing-room of the Hotel de Montmorin on the morning after the demolition of the Bastille. The unfortunate victim of a government which had long made that infamous prison an engine of tyranny, was introduced by our proud and determined ambassador, who spoke for him in no measured tones; for alas! the poor major could scarcely put three words together, and for some hours seemed to have forgotten the sound of his own voice. In the stately and now elderly French lady seated on the gilt fauteuil, between her shrieking and pitying daughters, clad in her high stays, hooped petticoat, and figured satin, with an esclavage round her neck, and her white hair powdered and towered up into a mountain of curls, flowers, and feathers, à la Marquise de Pompadour, it was impossible for Adam White to recognise the once beautiful and black-eyed Lucy of his youth--the simple Scottish girl of the quiet old manse on Tweedside, for whom his sorrowing heart had yearned with agony, in the long and dreary days of captivity, and in the longer watches of the silent night, until love and youth and blessed hope all passed away together. It was as difficult for her to trace in that wan, aged, and resuscitated man, the handsome young officer who had left her side to fight Britain's battles under Amherst and the hero of Quebec. She was now a white-haired matron, and he a wild-eyed, haggard old man--old by premature years, for eight-and-twenty in the Bastille had crushed him by a load of unavailing care and sorrow. How many seasons had passed over that dark and vaulted solitude during which his pained and weary eyes had never met a friendly smile, or his ear welcomed a kindly greeting.