Eight-and-twenty summers had bloomed and withered, and eight-and twenty winters had spread their snows upon the hills! In that long space of time, how many had been wedded and given in marriage, or been laid in their last homes?--how many of the brave and good, the noble and the beautiful, had gone to "the Land of the Leal," where there is no dawning or gloaming, where the sun shines for ever, and the flowers never die! For eight-and-twenty years all the pulses of life had seemed to stand still; and now, under their changed aspect and character, and ignorant of each other's presence, Lucy Fleming and Adam White stood within the same apartment, without a glance of recognition. Weak, tottering, and frail, White was placed in a chair, and the countess brought wine to him from a side table. His aspect was that of a dying man; her eyes were full of pity, and her daughters wept to see this poor old man, whose wandering faculties were awaking to a new existence after the long and dreamless sleep of eight-and-twenty years, and to whom the upper air, the blessed sunshine, and the twitter of the happy birds, were all as strange and new as if he had never known them. "Your name, monsieur le prisonnier?" asked her husband, coldly, and with averted eye. "Adam White--yes, yes--I am sure it was so--Adam White; once a major in the 42nd Regiment of his Britannic Majesty George II.," he replied, with great difficulty and long pauses. "George II. has been dead these twenty-eight years, sir," replied the Duke of Dorset, kindly placing an arm upon his shoulder, while, with outspread hands and eyes dilated with terror, the countess started back as if a spectre had risen before her. "Dead! dead!" muttered the major. "I too have been dead, I think--and who now is on the throne?" "His grandson, George III." "Know you the crime for which you were arrested, monsieur?" asked the count, who did not seem to notice the agitation of the countess. The sunken eyes of Major White flashed, but the emotion died at once, for his heart seemed broken and his spirit crushed. "Crime!" said he; "I was wounded and taken in the assault on Ticonderoga by the Comte de Montmorin." "I commanded there, and I am he." "This was thirty-one years ago--my God! oh, my God!" "Be calm, dear sir," said the Duke of Dorset. "And you have been all that time in the Bastille?" "Yes, monseigneur." "Horrible!" exclaimed the duke. "You were arrested"-- "One night in the streets of Paris, near the Port St. Antoine, when I was at liberty upon parole, as a prisoner of war." "When was this?" "In 1761--three years after Ticonderoga." "Ah, we had peace with Britain in 1768," said the count, averting his eyes, and endeavouring to assume a composure which he did not feel under the keen scrutiny of Dorset's eye. "And so we meet again--fortune has cast us together once more." "Fortune--say rather fatality," replied White, as some old memory shook his withered heart.