A revelation was all he wanted. On his own life, save in so far as Alison Cheyne was concerned, he set little store. How short seemed the minutes he used to spend with her under the old beeches at Chilcote, or when in Laura Dalton's at the Grange. Short and few, and how much alone he used to feel when not with her! Now how much more alone he felt, when he seemed to have so mysteriously and painfully lost her! After some coffee, backed by a _chasse_--_i.e._, dashed with cognac--he and Gabion--with the latter's case of pistols--departed before sunrise in a voiture for the citadel--a pretty long drive, through winding and tortuous streets, crossing between the great shipping basins at the Quai Hambourg, and ere long the houses were left behind, and the great grassy embankments of the fortress rose before them. Every feature of the scenery, every detail of what he saw, however petty and trivial, impressed itself curiously upon the mind of Bevil Goring on this eventful morning. A group of old peasant women, with wide dark-blue or black cloaks and coal-scuttle bonnets, gossiping in the roadway; children at cottage doors; Flemish labourers, with hard and earnest types of face, leisurely filling their huge pipes with tobacco; a boy sitting on a gate, munching a straw, and dreaming perhaps of the future; the view of the vast Scheldt, curving in a mighty sweep round the flat green Tête de Flandres, with all its steamers and other shipping. The mighty cathedral spire, and all the thousands of high-peaked roofs and masses of the quaint city, thrown forward in dark outline against the lurid and vapoury red of the winter morning sky, all seen like a vast panorama from the green heights of the citadel. Goring recalled the first morning he had seen the latter from the deck of the _Rotterdam_, and had looked at its great gaping embrasures and lunettes, well flanked out, with the leisurely interest it cannot fail to have in a soldier's eye. He was now perhaps looking upon Nature, with all her beauties, for the last time, and the coming spring and summer might be as nought to him, even after the wealth that had come upon him so unexpectedly; but if he was fated to fall by Cadbury's pistol his chief regret was not for these things, but the fear that, unless those in another world are cognisant of what passes in this, he would never know the fate of Alison Cheyne, or penetrate the veil that hid her whereabouts in mystery now! He listened somewhat as one in a dream to Victor Gabion, who was drawing his attention, with no small pride and enthusiasm, to the features of the mighty model citadel, which is now so deserted in aspect, and the streets in the immediate vicinity of which consist chiefly of the ruins of the arsenals and magazines, that were destroyed in the great siege of 1832, when only 4,500 Dutchmen, under old General Chassé, defended themselves with such desperation against 55,000 Frenchmen, under Marshal Gerard.