"Then perhaps my ears deceived me," replied the Bishop, looking as if he were pretty sure that they had not. "In that case I shall perhaps not be indiscreet if I tell you the name--admitting frankly that some of the context puzzled me. It was--'Anne.'" It may be seen what bond of error united the old French Bishop and the middy of the _Pomone_. Mme. de la Vireville clasped her little hands together. "But, Monseigneur, that exactly bears out what I said about his desiring a son. Anne is the name of the little boy I was referring to just now--Anne-Hilarion de Flavigny, his friend's son--the friend about whose fate, as Your Grandeur knows, Fortuné was anxious, but who proves, after all, to have been saved at Quiberon. Fortuné had promised the Marquis de Flavigny to look after the child if he--the Marquis--were killed." "But now, as the Marquis escaped, he will not be called upon to undertake this charge?" "No, Monseigneur." "That is a pity," said the Bishop, looking down reflectively at the radiant face of a little beruffed aconite at his feet. "There are all sorts of doors which only a child's hands can unlock." And, still looking at the aconite, he went on gently: "Madame, I should be doing wrong were I to disguise from you that the doctor does not think well of the lethargy which seems latterly to have taken possession of your son, and which appears to have so much connection with his physical condition." "I know it," said the poor mother, all the delicate colour gone from her cheeks. "But what more can I do, Monseigneur? I know that Fortuné loves me dearly, but I am old, and represent the past to him, not the future, and it is the past that he needs to forget. . . . He is ill, it is true--he has been very ill--but never have I seen him like this. Always, in whatever vicissitudes--and he has been severely wounded before, and I nursed him in Jersey--always he has been full of gaiety and courage. Now all that seems to have deserted him, as if he did not care to live." "Madame, is that, after all, so much to be wondered at?" asked the Bishop gravely. "If you or I had fought at Quiberon, and had seen nearly all our comrades massacred in cold blood, might we not be tempted to feel the same? There is much buried on that shore which engulfed so many hopes. I think M. de la Vireville has left his there, as others their lives. There is not, I fancy, any great difference between the two losses. . . . Still, as I said, a child's hand holds many keys, to shut or to open." He stooped at last, a little painfully, and picked the aconite, and added to himself, "As we say to the Child who was Himself the Key . . . _O Clavis David, qui aperis et nemo claudit; claudis et nemo aperit, veni et educ vinctum de domo carceris, sedentem in umbra mortis_. . . . I wish your son could have had the care of this child you speak of."