But when a conviction of ten years' growth--one, moreover, which you have just been stoutly affirming with your own lips--is as suddenly felled as was Mme. de la Vireville's about her son, it is natural to find its collapse somewhat devastating. Fortuné's mother, hardly aware that Monseigneur had left her, stood beside the snowdrops, certainly more engrossed than was Monseigneur himself at the other end of the path--and the antiphon to _her_ Hours was a name she had never heard before. CHAPTER XXXVII THE CHILD UNLOCKS THE DOOR (1) The Chevalier de la Vireville was lying, as he had so often lain, staring at the stuffed trout and the triptych of the Assumption. The adventurous and disappointed spirit which dwelt in him, that had always faced with a jest every blow of circumstance--but one--had indeed ebbed very low. Although the sun which five days ago had opened the aconites in the garden came streaming into the room in a way to rejoice the heart of the room's late owner, who had given it up for that very reason, the present occupant was perfectly indifferent as to whether the sun shone or no. He was back at Quiberon in the rain--back at Auray in the little chapel, emptied of all its victims save him alone--back in front of those levelled muskets which he alone had escaped. . . . Why, in God's name, had fate so marked him out for safety? Why had he put himself to the agony of that derelict voyage to Houat and the long suffering that came after? Mostly because of his promise to his friend, and because he thought Anne wanted him . . . or because he wanted Anne. But he was not needed, neither by the boy nor by anyone. He had built a foolish dream on the assumption of René's death, which to him had seemed a certainty. The dream had proved baseless, like everything else, and all it had done was to plant in his sincere thankfulness for René's escape a thorn of regret which was horrible to him, and made him, who had suffered so bitterly from treachery, feel a traitor himself. No, he was not needed any more; he had done his work. Or rather, he had not even that consolation, for everything to which he had set his hand at Quiberon had been a failure, even though the fault were not his. His men, whom he had never once led to victory in the Morbihan, were dead or disbanded. There was nothing for him to do henceforward, and even had there been, he was useless--a tool that had never been of much account, and was now blunted for the rest of time. And further back still. . . . Had he not failed to keep the woman he loved, the woman who had spurned even the difficult sacrifice he had made for her sake, when he had spared her lover? He had no daily perils now to anodyne that ache. But he had another ache to set against it. . . .