Midnight had long chimed solemnly from the Castle clock when they at last left the library where they had spent the _veillée_, and marched side by side down the immense second-floor gallery upon which all the bedrooms opened. Basil and Régis took Marguerite to her door, and were about to say good-night, when she suddenly swerved to the right and, noiselessly opening another, beckoned them to follow, one finger on her lips commanding silence. Régis understood, and fell back to let Basil pass, while he, thinking of some joke to be perpetrated upon him, obeyed, on tiptoe, assuming a portentous mien. Immediately behind Marguerite he entered a room of truly enormous dimensions, high-ceiled, and hung with gay cretonne, upon which, as far as he could see, fairy-like birds disported themselves around dream-flowers. The furniture was all of white lacquer, and the thick carpet underfoot of similar snowiness, with here and there an ice-bear skin flung across its stainless surface. A tall screen of carven wood was curved before the cretonne-curtained windows, and to this recess Marguerite led the way, still on the points of her slippers. The rosy globe hanging from the ceiling did not give very much light, but quite sufficient to bring Basil suddenly to a stop, for there, on a narrow brass bed, the silken coverings thrown back from his sturdy little form, lay, fast asleep, the handsomest boy it was possible to see. The shapely, strong limbs, the tanned, slightly flushed cheeks, the soft curling hair and thickly fringed eyelids, made a picture vigorous and beautiful, to which Marguerite, her fingers on Basil’s sleeve, pointed proudly. “Behold your son!” she murmured, laughingly; and Basil suddenly shivered from head to foot. “Your son!” she repeated, in a fragrant whisper, leaning closer to him. “Your son, and your second self. Look!” Above the bed hung a portrait of Basil when yet a lad, and given to Régis’s mother at the time. The diffused glow from the night-lamp somehow seemed to concentrate upon the lifelike painting before which it was hung, and it would have taken a purposely obtuse eye not to be struck by the amazing resemblance between it and the little sleeper beneath. In her innocent endeavor to reconquer Basil’s love for Piotr, Marguerite could not have designed a more Machiavelian plan. “_Aux innocents les mains pleines_,” says the old proverb, and who can call it untrue? Without a word Basil was staring, first at the picture, then at the living, breathing miniature thereof on the pillow; and Marguerite, watching him with all the intentness of her blue eyes, saw the rigid features slowly relax, soften, hesitate as it were in their expression of dawning ecstasy. “What is it?” she breathed faintly, more to herself than to him.