The De la Bourbonais were an old race of royalists whose archives could have furnished novels for a generation without mixing one line of fiction with volumes of fact. They had fought in every Crusade, and won spurs on every battle-field wherever a French prince fought; they had produced heroes and heroines in the centuries when such things were expected from the feudal lords of France, and they had furnished scapegraces without end when these latter became the fashion; they had quarrelled with their neighbors, stormed their castles, and misbehaved themselves generally like other noble families of their time, dividing their days between war and gallantry so evenly that it was often difficult to say where the one began and where the other ended, or which led to which. This was in the good old times. Then the Revolution came. The territorial importance of the De la Bourbonais was considerably diminished at this date; but the prestige of the old name, with the deeds of prowess that had once made it a power in the camp and a glory at the court, was as great as ever, and marked its owners amongst the earliest victims of the Terror. They gave their full contingent of blue blood to the guillotine, and what lands remained to them were confiscated to the Regenerators of France. The then head of the house, the father of the present Comte Raymond, died in England under the roof of his friend, Sir Alexander Harness, father of Sir Simon. The son that was born to him in exile returned to France at the Restoration, and grew up in solitude in the old castle that had withstood so many storms, and--thanks partly to its dilapidated condition, but chiefly to the fidelity and courage of an old dependent--had been rescued from the general plunder, and left unmolested for the young master who came back to claim it. Comte Raymond lived there in learned isolation, sharing the ancestral ruin with a population of owls, who pursued their meditations in one wing while he pondered over philosophical problems in another. It was a dreary abode, except for the owls; a desolate wreck of ancient splendor and power. We may poetize over ruins, and clothe them with what pathos we will, the beauty of decay is but the beauty of death; the ivy that flourishes on the grave of a glorious past is but a harvest of death; it looks beautiful in the weird silver shadows of the moon, but it shrinks before the blaze of day that lights up the proud castle on the hill, standing in its strength of battlement and tower and flying buttress, and smiling a grim, granite smile upon the gray wreck in the valley down below, and wondering what poets and night-birds can find in its crumbling arches and gaping windows to haunt them so fanatically. Raymond de la Bourbonais was contented in his weather-beaten old fortress, and would probably never have dreamed of leaving it or changing the owl-like routine of his life, if it had not entered into the mind of his grand-aunt, the only remaining lady of