Back came Mrs. Bent, a wine-glass in one hand, and a hot-water bottle for the bed in the other. The glass contained some of her famous cordial--in her opinion a remedy for half the ills under the sun. Madame Guise was then quietly seated by the fire, gazing into it with a far-away look, her hands folded on her lap. She drank the glass of cordial with thanks: though it seemed of no moment what she drank or what she did not drink just then. And little Marie, her cheeks flushed, her rosy lips open sufficiently to show her pretty white teeth, had dropped off to sleep again. CHAPTER XIII. A STORM OF WIND. The wind was rising. Coming in gusts from across the sea, it swept round the Dolphin Inn with a force that seemed to shake the old walls and stir the windowpanes--for the corner that made the site of the inn was always an exposed one. Madame Guise, undressing slowly by the expiring fire in her chamber, shivered as she listened to it. The wind did not howl in this fashion around her own sheltered home in the sunny Dauphine. There was no grand sea there for it to whirl and play over, and come off with a shrieking moan. Not often there did they get cold weather like this; or white snow covering the plains; or ice in the water-jugs. And never yet before in her uneventful life, had it fallen to her lot to travel all across France from South to North with a little child to take care of, and then to encounter the many hours' passage in a stifling ship on a rough and raging sea: and after a night's rest in London to come off again in the cold English stage-coach for how many miles she hew not. All this might have served to take the colour from her face and to give the shiverings to her frame--for land travelling in those days was not the easy pastime it is made now. But there was worse behind it. Not the cold, not the want of rest, was it that was so trying to her, but the frightful whispers of a supposed tragedy that had (so to say) greeted her arrival at the Dolphin. But a few hours yet within its walls, and she had been told that him of whom she had come in secret search, her husband, had disappeared out of life. For this poor young lady, Charlotte Guise, was in truth the wife of Anthony Castlemaine. His wife if he were still living; his widow if he were dead. That he was dead, hearing all she had heard, no doubt could exist in her mind; no hope of the contrary, not the faintest shadow of it, could enter her heart. She had come all this long journey in search of her husband, fearing some vague treachery; she had arrived to find that treachery of the deepest dye had only too probably put him out of sight for ever. When the father, Basil Castlemaine, was on his death-bed, she had heard the charge he gave to Anthony, to come over to England and put in the claim to his right inheritance; she had heard the warning of possible treachery that had accompanied it.