A month after the occurrence of the stirring events we have just narrated, Quentin Kennedy found himself an inmate of the same house with his young French friend at Corunna--the pretty villa that faced the bay of Orsan, the same mansion in which the Master of Rohallion spent that remarkable night before the battle. General de Ribeaupierre had been appointed by Marshal Soult military governor of the town and citadel of Corunna, in which there was a strong French garrison; but instead of occupying the gloomy quarters assigned to the governor, Madame de Ribeaupierre, who had joined him, preferred the little Villa de Orsan near the coast, and had prevailed upon him to place Eugene on his staff as an aide-de-camp, and thus the whole of her household now seemed, for the time, to be peacefully located in that remote corner of Gallicia. Both madame and her husband the general were considerably past the prime of life. He was a fine courtly gentleman of the old French school, and in his secret heart was a sincere monarchist, but not so rashly as to oppose in act or spirit the tide of events which had replaced the line of St. Louis by Napoleon, with whom he had served early in life, as we have before stated, in the Regiment of La Fere. Madame might still be called handsome, though long past forty. Perfectly regular, finely cut, and having all the impress of good birth and high culture, her features were remarkably beautiful. Her manner was singularly sweet, gentle, and pleasing; yet she had an eye and a lip indicative of a proud and lofty spirit, that had enabled her to confront the blackest horrors of the Revolution in France. Powdered white as snow, she wore her hair dressed back over a little cushion, with a few stray ringlets falling behind in the coquettish manner of the old Bourbon days (when patches and pomatum were in all their glory), while her full bust, plump white arms, her short sleeves with long elbow-gloves, her peaked stomacher and her amplitude of brocade skirt, with many a deep flounce and frill of old Maltese lace, all made her a pleasing picture at a time when, in imitation of the prevailing French taste, the English woman of fashion wore a huge muslin cap, her waist under her armpits, and her skirts so tight that she resembled nothing in this world but a long bolster set on end. Knowing how much the young prisoner of war and Eugene owed to each other, and how much the former had suffered recently under the sabre of the latter, she rivalled her husband in kindness, and was unremitting in her hospitality, her nursing, and her motherly attention.