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Mrs. a Cleeve sat by her boudoir fire embroidering an altar frontal for the private chapel. At the sound of a footstep in the passage she stopped her work with a sharp contraction of the heart: even the clattering wooden shoes could not wholly disguise that footstep for her. She was rising from her deep chair as Walter opened the door; but sank back trembling, and put a hand over her white face.

“Mother!”

It was he. He was kneeling: she felt his hands go about her waist and his head sink in her lap.

“Oh, Walter! Oh, my son!”

“Mother!” he repeated with a sob. She bent her face and kissed him.

“Those horrible clothes–you have suffered! But you have escaped! Tell me–“

In broken sentences he began to tell her.

“You have seen your father?” she asked, interrupting him.

“Not yet. I have seen nobody: I came straight to you.”

“He is greatly aged.”

There came a knock at the door, and Father Halloran stood on the threshold confounded.

The priest was a tall and handsome Irishman, white-haired, with a genial laughing eye, and a touch of grave wisdom behind his geniality.

“Walter, dear lad! For the love of the saints tell us–how does this happen?”

Walter began his story again. The mother gazed into his face in a rapture. But the priest’s brow, at first jolly, little by little contracted with a puzzled frown.

“I don’t altogether understand,” he said. “They scarcely watched you at all, it seems?”

“Thank God for their carelessness!” put in Mrs. a Cleeve fervently.

“And you escaped. There was nothing to prevent? They hadn’t exacted any sort of parole?”

“Well, there was a sort of promise,”–the boy flushed hotly–“not what you’d call a real promise. The fellow–a sort of prefect in a tricolour sash–had us up in a room before him, and gabbled through some form of words that not one of us rightly understood. I heard afterwards some pretty stories of this gentleman. He had been a contractor to the late Republic, in horse-forage, and had swindled the Government (people said) to the tune of some millions of francs. Marengo finished him: he had been speculating against it on the sly, which lost his plunder and the most of his credit. On the remains of it he had managed to scrape into this prefecture. A nice sort of man to administer oaths!”

Father Halloran turned impatiently to the window, and, leaning a hand on one of the stone mullions, gazed out upon the small garden. Daylight was failing, and the dusk out there on the few autumn flowers seemed one with the chill shadow touching his hopes and robbing them of colour. He shivered: and as with a small shiver men sometimes greet a deadly sickness, so Father Halloran’s shiver presaged the doom of a life’s hope. He had been Walter’s tutor, and had built much on the boy: he had read warnings from time to time, and tried at once to obey them and persuade himself that they were not serious–that his anxiety magnified them. If honour could be inherited, it surely ran in Walter’s blood; in honour–the priest could assert with a good conscience–he had been instructed. And yet–

The lad had turned to his mother, and went on with a kind of sullen eagerness: “There were sixteen of us, including an English clergyman, his wife and two young children, and a young couple travelling on their honeymoon. It wasn’t as if they had taken our word and let us go: they marched us off at once to special quarters–billeted us all in one house, over a greengrocer’s shop, with a Government concierge below stairs to keep watch on our going and coming. A roll was called every night at eight–you see, there was no liberty about it. The whole thing was a fraud. Father Halloran may say what he likes, but there are two sides to a bargain; and if one party breaks faith, what becomes of the other’s promise?”