After supper I went round the quarters which had been assigned to me, and concluded all my arrangements; and Louise, fatigued as she had been during the preceding night and day, retired to rest soon after my return. Dame Marguelette, and one of the maids who had been with her, slept in the same chamber, and retired at the same time; and good old La Tour and I were left alone. I was certainly altogether unprepared for the conversation that was to ensue. "Henry," he said, as soon as we were quite alone and the door shut, "Henry, I am anxious for you and for Louise, most anxious for Louise." And, as he spoke, there was a sad and foreboding look about his eyes which showed that the anxiety that he spoke of was deeper than the lips. "Indeed!" I replied, with a thousand vague and unreal fears excited in a moment: "and what makes you so anxious, my dear friend? Why are you troubled, La Tour? I have seen, indeed, that it was so all supper-time, though I knew not why." "Oh Henry," cried the old man, "does not your own heart tell you why? Do not your own feelings at this moment?" "No, indeed, my dear sir," I replied, "I have no such feelings at all, no such sensations; I know not what you allude to. It might, perhaps, be wrong to bring Louise away, and I would not have done it if there had been any choice. But she must have explained to you that it was done without my knowing it, and, once done, impossible to take her back." "It is not that at all, it is not that at all, Henry," replied La Tour; "it is--it is," he continued, hesitating, "it is that you love Louise, Henry, and that," he paused for a moment or two, and then added, "it is useless to conceal it; you know it already; you guess it, you see it, even if she have not acknowledged it to you with her own lips; it is that you love Louise, Henry, and that she loves you." I might have replied that it was quite natural that it should be so; I might have replied that we had always loved each other, and that he knew it; but I would not have equivocated with that straightforward, honest, kind-hearted old man for the world, and I therefore answered him. "Is that the cause, my good friend, why you are so grieved? In truth, I see not why it should so grieve you; nothing can be more natural than that it should be as it is. I affect not to deny that I love Louise to the full extent of your meaning. Whether she loves me or not--though I do believe and hope she does--I can in no degree tell, for we never have spoken to each other on such a theme; but, even taking it for granted that she does, where is the terrible evil which should make our best and oldest friend look sad, and evidently feel pained, to behold two people, to whom he has been a father indeed, love each other mutually, dearly, and well?"