"_Tonnerre de Ciel!_ don't speak to me of your father," said the man, grinding his teeth; "I was an honest woodcutter in the Black Forest of Hunandaye till he ruined me." "Impossible! my good father is incapable of such a thing." "Nothing is impossible to dukes and peers of France, who have the Bastille and the dungeons of their own chateaux at their command." "But he ruined you? Alas! how?" "By permitting his nephew--the Comte de Bourgneuf--to carry off my sister; and because I resented the act, he had my cottage demolished, my mother driven into the forest where she was devoured by wolves, and myself he chained to work like a felon on the roads and ramparts of St. Malo and the aqueducts at Dol." "Alas! monsieur, I swear to you that my father was blameless in all this, and even were it not so, why are you so merciless to me--why make me thus your prisoner?" "Because you are beautiful," said the fellow, with a grating laugh. "Despite these wrongs, I risked my life for France, or rather for French gold. I have been at the bottom of the sea, _pardieu!_ and am now on firm land. I have been dead, and am come alive again! Ha! ha! Bourgneuf carried off my sister. I carry off you--_chacun à son gout_--(every man to his taste.") "Ah! have mercy. See how I weep." "Of course; weeping is a complaint that is very common among women. The count took my sister to Paris, and she was never heard of again. I shall take you to the Black Forest of Hunandaye, and never shall you be heard of either, unless your friends are rash enough to seek you in the subterranean torrent of St. Aubin du Cormier." "This fellow is mad; but whether mad or not, I must save the poor girl at all hazards," thought I, while shaking the priming in the pan of my holster pistol. "Have you no dread of punishment, for thus daring to molest me?" demanded the lady. "No. Neither here nor hereafter. You shall live with me in the forest, and when tired of you----" "I shall escape and proclaim you." "_Pardieu!_ you won't, my beauty; because I shall kill you, and your disappearance will, like the king's ships, be set down to the score of these pestilent English, who have come hither to turn our Brittany upside down. Besides, who knows that _I_ have carried you off?" "And you will kill me--I, who never harmed you in thought, in word, or deed?" said she, with a shudder. "Yes," he hissed through his clenched teeth. "Oh, horror! Will no one rescue me?" "_Oui! Sacré!_ Kill you quietly and secretly, even as I killed quietly and surely the English captain of the Chevaux Legers in the wood near Cancalle yesterday."