Raymonde de Guéfontaine checked herself. The light which had been in her downcast eyes was extinguished. "Oh no, ma tante. My portrait has no original . . . _now_," she added inaudibly, and, turning away, she began to rearrange the flowers at her breast, just one minute before M. le Duc de Pontferrand, with his smile and his smooth, portly, debonair presence, was announced. * * * * * That night she revisited Porhoët in her dreams. The tide was up, the moon was full, and from her little cottage, as she stood on the sand and looked up at it, shone a light. She went up the path, lifted the latch, and entered; and sitting at the table, breaking bread together, were the two who had never met in life--André, pale and smiling, with the fatal bullet wound in his forehead, and . . . the Chevalier de la Vireville. They both rose as she came in, and held out their glasses towards her, and as La Vireville moved she saw the blood run through the fingers of the hand which he held pressed against his side. She stretched out her arms towards the two phantoms with a great cry--"Mes morts!" and with that woke, and lay sobbing. * * * * * A week later she was on her way back to Guernsey--Guernsey, whence she could sometimes see the coast of that France for which they both had died. CHAPTER XXXIV MONSEIGNEUR'S GUEST (1) Up and down the Hard at Portsmouth, among rough sailors and rough language, but apparently unconscious of either, there walked in the last days of November 1795 a little old man in the dress of a French ecclesiastic, absorbed in a book. Such sights were not very infrequent now in the southern ports, and if they aroused occasional comment, it was not of a hostile nature. This old priest was small, frail, and a little shabby, but of a very unaffected dignity, and on one finger shone an amethyst ring. "Monseigneur does choose such extraordinary places to say his office in!" thought a younger and taller priest, making his way through the throng to the old man. "One knows, of course, that it is all the same to him wherever he is." He approached his compatriot and addressed him with deference. For the shabby little ecclesiastic was the exiled bishop of one of the most important dioceses in France. "It is as Your Grandeur thought. The corvette is from Houat, and she has on board a dozen or so of our unfortunate fellow-countrymen from Quiberon. They are sending them ashore now." The Bishop slipped the book he was reading into a bulged pocket. "Then we will go and meet them. Ah, pardon, my friend, I hope I have not hurt you?" he exclaimed, as, in turning, he collided with a gigantic man-o'-war's man in a shiny tarpaulin hat.