And into the prostrate man's somewhat limited field of vision came a dark, good-looking young man whose resemblance to Mme. de Guéfontaine proclaimed his relationship. His sister slipped her arm into his. ("Now I wonder," thought Fortuné, "how far her fraternal affection for _this_ brother would carry her!") "Monsieur," began Henri du Coudrais, with emotion, standing looking down upon the Chouan. "I have no words to express my apologies, my gratitude, or my sense of your magnanimity. But why did you not tell my sister the truth?" "Monsieur," replied La Vireville from the floor, "I began to do so, but . . . had not time to finish. And I do not think that I should have been believed. . . . But permit me to say, M. du Coudrais, that if I had a sister, and she had been placed in like circumstances, I could only be flattered if her affection for me had led her to do the same, in all things, as Madame has done." Mme. de Guéfontaine lifted her head from her brother's shoulder, against which she had suddenly hidden her face. "In all things?" she repeated, stressing the words, and with something like a remembered horror in her eyes. Fortuné de la Vireville raised himself a trifle, while his fingers, as if unconsciously, tapped out a little tune on the handle of his hunting-knife. "Yes," he said, smiling at her meaningly and half-mischievously, "_in all things!_" And the old beams, which had heard so many wise and foolish utterances, caught and flung to each other his perverse and fantastic condonation. CHAPTER XX SEA-HOLLY (1) The moon that night, peering through the half-shuttered windows of the manoir, spilt on the dark floor pools that reminded La Vireville of those others in the interminable wet road of the afternoon. Mme de Guéfontaine and her brother had contrived for him a fairly comfortable resting-place by piling some old moth-eaten hangings and a cloak or two on the oak settle, and he had been made, despite his protests, to occupy this couch. But his foot pained him too much to admit of sleep. From where he lay he could just see Mme. de Guéfontaine lying back in a great chair by the empty hearth, a cloak over her knees; and at one time the direct moonlight itself, falling on her fine, weary profile, showed a wisp or two of hair escaping down her cheek, a relic of her wild ride with the Chouan. But he knew that she slept only in snatches, and that she was concerned for him. Every time that she stirred and turned her head in his direction he deceitfully closed his eyes to delude her into the belief that he was not awake. At her feet lay her brother, wrapped in his cloak; he at least seemed to be enjoying a motionless repose, and evidences of an acoustic kind went to prove that Grain d'Orge, self-banished, out of respect, to the other end of the hall, was certainly not suffering from insomnia.