"Mother, mother, you never wore and you never can wear that expression. You were kind and gentle, were you not? You used to smile; and, if you were still alive, you would now be wearing that same kind and gentle look? Mother, darling, since the terrible night when Paul recognized your portrait, I have often been back to that room, to learn to know my mother's face, which I had forgotten: I was so young, mother, when you died! And, though I was sorry that the painter had given you a different expression from the one I should have liked to see, at least it was not the wicked and malignant expression of just now. Why should you hate me? I am your daughter. Father has often told me that we had the same smile, you and I, and also that your eyes would grow moist with tears when you looked at me. So you do not loathe me, do you? And I did dream, did I not? "Or, at least, if I was not dreaming when I saw a woman in my room, I was dreaming when that woman seemed to me to have your face. It was a delirious hallucination, it must have been. I had looked at your portrait so long and thought of you so much that I gave the stranger the features which I knew; and it was she, not you, who bore that hateful expression. "And so I sha'n't drink the water. What she poured into it must have been poison . . . or perhaps a powerful sleeping-drug which would make me helpless against the prince. . . . And I cannot but think of the woman who sometimes walks with him. . . . "As for me, I know nothing, I understand nothing, my thoughts are whirling in my tired brain. . . . "It will soon be three o'clock. . . . I am waiting for Rosalie. It is a quiet night. There is not a sound in the house or outside. . . . "It is striking three. Ah, to be away from this! . . . To be free! . . ." CHAPTER X 75 OR 155? Paul Delroze anxiously turned the page, as though hoping that the plan of escape might have proved successful; and he received, as it were, a fresh shock of grief on reading the first lines, written the following morning, in an almost illegible hand: "We were denounced, betrayed. . . . Twenty men were spying on our movements. . . . They fell upon us like brutes. . . . I am now locked up in the park lodge. A little lean-to beside it is serving as a prison for Jérôme and Rosalie. They are bound and gagged. I am free, but there are soldiers at the door. I can hear them speaking to one another. "_Twelve mid-day._