‘Remember him! I should think I did indeed, miss,’ exclaimed the dame. ‘I remember him so well as a boy, that it’s as much as I can do to believe he can have growed into a man. “Can it really be him,” I says to myself when I sees him come in at that gate just now, “him as I remember in holland pinafores, two fresh ones every day, and never clean half an hour after they were put on?”’ ‘Did he make his pinafores very dirty?’ asked Lucille with a slight revulsion of feeling. Lucius ought to have been an ideal boy, and spotless as to his pinafores. ‘There never was such a pickle, miss; but so kind and loving with it all, and so bold and open. Never no fibbing with him. And many a pound he’s sent me since I’ve lived here; though I don’t suppose he’s got too many of ’em for hisself, bless his kind heart.’ Lucille rewarded the lips that praised her lover with a kiss. ‘What a dear good soul you are!’ she said. ‘I’m so happy to have come here.’ ‘Yes, you’ll be happy with our Miss Janet, begging her pardon; but, never having seen Mr. Bertram, I haven’t got him in my mind like when I think of her. You’re sure to take to Miss Janet. She’s a little proud and high in her ways to strangers, but she has as good a heart as her brother.’ A nice little dinner had been prepared for the travellers. Lucius would have only just time to dine, and then return to the station, in order to be back in time for the Newhaven train from London-bridge. It would be a hard day’s work for him altogether; but what was that when weighed against the pleasure of having brought these two together thus—the sister he loved and had once deemed lost, and the girl who was to be his wife. The parting cost them all a pang, though he promised to come back in a week, if all went well with him, and fetch Lucille. ‘I could not stay away from my grandfather longer than that, Lucius,’ she said; ‘and,’ in a lower tone, ‘it will seem a very long time to be separated from you.’ Book the Last. CHAPTER I. AT ROUEN. It was still quite early in the day when Lucius entered Rouen, but the bustle of commerce had begun upon the quays. Shrill voices bawled to each other among the shipping, and it seemed as if a small slice of the West India Docks had been transferred to this bluer stream. The bustle of business here was a very small matter compared with the press and clamour of the Shadrack-Basin district. Still the town had a prosperous progressive air. Lofty stone-fronted mansions and lofty stone-fronted warehouses glared whitely in the sunshine, some finished and occupied, but more in process of construction. This mushroom growth of modern commerce seemed to have risen all at once, to overshadow the quaint old city where the warrior-maid was martyred. Lucius, who had not seen the place for some years, looked round him aghast. This broad lime-white boulevard, these tall lime-white buildings, were as new as Aladdin’s palace.