Alain was not a man of the world. With something of a poet's nature, he was born to be the slave of women. Passionately attached to the mother who had brought him up--and who was lately dead--and wholly unacquainted with the coarser aspects of feminine character, he had a romantic ideal of womanhood. The ladies in whose company he might chance to find himself were usually quick enough to discover this; and seeing him at their feet were always trampling upon him, reserving their wiles and fascinations for men who were more artful or less chivalrous. The case was by no means singular in those days, and is believed to be occasionally reproduced even in more recent times. He was now thoroughly annoyed; and Rose's reasoning, far from composing his mind, had rendered it only the more anxious. Therefore, when Marguerite returned into the parlour, with a somewhat heightened colour, Alain affected to take no notice of her, and sate gazing moodily at the fire. "I have been plucking these roses," said the girl, offering Alain a bunch of flowers wet with early dew. He took them with a negligent air, stuck one of the buds into the band of his broad-brimmed hat that lay on the table, and allowed the rest to fall upon the rushes that strewed the stone floor. Marguerite, with a slight and mocking grimace, watched the ill-tempered action without taking any audible notice of it. Then resuming her seat, she took up her wool and needles and applied herself to her interrupted knitting. Meantime the page, apparently well satisfied with the circumstances of his visit, including those of his parting from the fair Marguerite, pursued his way to S. Helier. The darkness of the autumn evening was relieved by the multitudinous illumination of a cloudless sky. The lanes, bordered by the fortress-like enclosures of the fields, were shaded overhead by tunnels of interlacing boughs still in the full thickness of their summer foliage. A bird, disturbed by Elliot's brushing against the branch on which she roosted, gave a solitary cry of angry alarm; the dogs barked in the distant farms; the grazing cows, tethered in the wayside pastures, made soft noises as they cropped the grass. Passing on by the old grammar school of S. Manelier and then through the village of Five Oaks, where he scared a quiet family assembled in their parlour by looking in at their window with a grimace and a wild scream, he ran on rapidly by the Town Mills and through the town towards the quay. When he reached the bridge-head the tide was ebbing; but partly walking, partly wading, he made good his footing on the Castle-rock. A sleepy sentry challenged, but the page crept through the darkness without deigning a reply. A ball whizzed through his hat, but did not check his progress. Availing himself of projections in the wall with which he seemed well acquainted, he entered his own little room by the open casement, and throwing himself on the pallet soon slept the sleep of youth and healthy fatigue.