"My brother André had that kind of luck too," said she sadly. "But it failed him in the end." La Vireville perceived that she wanted to talk about him--perhaps as a kind of amende honorable for her suspicions and hostility at Porhoët. "If you cannot sleep, Madame," he suggested, "will you not tell me about your brother? You see, I only knew of him as 'Alexis,' and I must tell you that I had got it into my head that his real name was de Kérouan or something of the sort." "At what cross-purposes were we playing!" she exclaimed. "Do you really wish me to tell you about André?" "If you will be so good," replied Fortuné. "Consider also, if you please, Madame, that I have procured you a chair here." She smiled a little, and, bringing one quietly to the side of the settle, sat down, and began in her low and beautiful voice to tell him her history. There was a strange kind of unreal and yet intimate charm in this recital in the morning twilight, that went back now and then to childish days, some of which this old hall itself had witnessed. For here André and Raymonde du Coudrais, from their home in more western Brittany, had been used to visit an old uncle and aunt, and here they and their cousins had played hide-and-seek, and here André himself had lain hid only a week before his death. By reason of its early associations with that beloved brother the old place was now, the narrator confessed, painful to her, yet with a kind of sweetness. But the rest of the Carhoët country, she suddenly acknowledged in a voice that shook, had become intolerable to her.