La Vireville smiled. "Never!" he said. "What put such an idea into your head? I was in the navy once, it is true--I served under Suffren--but I assure you that I got there by the most legitimate channels. Mind that root, child!" "Papa said that you had been a sailor," explained Anne, "and I thought----" "I see," said his friend, amused. "Are there as many trees as this in Jersey?" was Anne-Hilarion's next question. "No, nephew, there are not. By the way, I don't believe I have ever told you where I am going to take you when we get to St. Helier--to Jersey, that is?" "Perhaps to the house of a pirate?" suggested Anne-Hilarion hopefully. This time La Vireville laughed outright. "My child, what an imagination you have! No; to the house of my mother. She lives there." "Why?" inquired his charge. La Vireville did not answer for a moment. "For various reasons," he replied, at length. "One of them you will see in a few minutes." "I should think," observed Anne, looking about him as they went on, "that it was in a big wood like this, where nobody could see them, that the two brothers of Liddesdale met and fought." "Who were they?" asked the Frenchman. "I never heard of them." "They are in a story of Elspeth's that she told me once. They fought about a lady, and the lady was false to both of them. Is that why people generally fight duels, M. le Chevalier?" La Vireville switched at an anemone with a hazel twig that he had pulled off. "Good God!" he exclaimed to himself. "It is not the only reason, child," he returned. "But duels are not subjects for little boys to talk about." Ordinarily Anne-Hilarion would have been deterred at once by a tone and a phraseology so foreign to the speaker, as he knew him, but he was undeniably wrought upon by his surroundings, and pursued the forbidden topic. "I expect you have fought a duel, have you not, M. le Chevalier?" he said tentatively, looking up at his tall companion. But La Vireville was silent. "Perhaps several?" suggested the inquirer; and though he still got no answer, went on, "Were any of them here, in this wood?" "No," said the Chouan, walking very fast. "--Now leave the subject alone, there's a good child! You will see in a moment what we have come to see. Here the wood ends, but it goes on again afterwards." They had come, in fact, to the edge of the forest--or, rather, to an extensive clearing crossed by a deep-rutted woodland road. The émigré led the way along this for twenty yards or so, and the stopped. There in front of them, at the end of a grass-grown avenue of larches, now swaying in all their first delicate green joy, stood the corpse of a large seventeenth century manor-house. Not decay, but violence, had slain it; it was gutted from end to end, so that with its blackened, jagged walls, its grinning rafters, and the few tall chimneys that yet stood, it looked, between those arcades of feathery mirth, like a skeleton in fairyland.