René de Flavigny, lying wearily in his mahogany fourposter, was a little reproachful when he heard of this visit, showing, in fact, some of the petulance of the convalescent. He asked why his father-in-law had not brought Mme. de Guéfontaine in to see him. "I am sorry, my boy," said Mr. Elphinstone. "I thought it would be too much for you. Still, it might have been a consolation to her to talk with you." "Not that I could have told her anything consoling," said the Marquis dismally. "Fortuné is engulfed with the rest--we shall never see him again. Did you tell her what Tollemache said?" "Yes," said the old man, with a sigh. "She took it, I think, as conclusive. She had great self-command." His son-in-law sighed too, a sigh of utter weariness and depression. "I wonder what she was to M. de la Vireville," said Mr. Elphinstone, pursuing his train of thought, as he stooped to mend the fire. René started. He was back suddenly at Quiberon, on the rocks in the sunshine, in his friend's quarters by candlelight. "Bon Dieu!" he murmured to himself. "I have only once--no, twice--heard him speak of a woman," he added aloud. "Surely it cannot have been she!" CHAPTER XXXIII THE MAN SHE WOULD HAVE MARRIED (1) So he was dead--was lying with his comrades in a hasty trench at Auray, or under the bloodstained sand of Quiberon itself. Sometimes--for she had heard that many had been drowned--Raymonde de Guéfontaine had fancied that the sea, out of which he had come to her, had claimed him again, and that his body lay forgotten on some lonely Breton beach, or swayed gently, far down, with the drift of the full Atlantic. It was not so; French soil held him, as she hoped it would hold her some day. Yet, no more than the little boy, should she look on him again. The October sunshine seemed to hurt her eyes as she went along Oxford Street. These English people too, prosperous and indifferent, who walked the streets of their dull city without a care, with such satisfied faces, such garish-coloured clothes--she hated them! Why had not England done more, lent the full weight of her arm to that doomed enterprise? England had not shed a drop of her blood for it. There were even those who said that she was not sorry to know that so much French blood had flowed, and was glad to have rid herself so cheaply of some of her pensioners. Raymonde de Guéfontaine had too generous a nature herself to lend a ready credence to that rumour, and yet she felt that the country which sheltered her had wounded her too. For someone had told her that, to England, the main significance of the expedition which had meant so much to her and hers was that it had served as a diversion in favour of England's ally, Austria; and seeing how, at the end, it had been hurried forward, she did not wholly disbelieve this.