Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: standing half-a-mile oft' in the flat park, dark and solitary, its tall keep standing up conspicuous above the more modern part. Not a light was to. be seen at any of the upper windows, nor a human being moving about it; for month's past only nn old gardener and his wife had lived in the chateau, but her heart leaped up in fresh excitement as she ran towards it, at the sight of a gleam from a lower room, where neither Blaise nor his wife were likely to be. Edniee knew that it was there she must seek Alain de St. Aignan. She had not seen him for several years—not since he had outgrown his boyhood ; she might not have recognised him had she met him, but he was the son of one whom she had passionately loved, and her errand was to hinder her own father from bringing him to the scaffold. Edmee knew well that a St. Aignau would only leave the prisons of Macon for the guillotine What would happen should Leroux find out how she had crossed Ids purposes she scarcely thought. Hers was the woman's courage, which rises to confront an emergency, and the one thin" in her mind was how to forestall Leroux. CHAPTER III. A REPUBLICAN WEDDING. Alain De St. Aignan had never been within the walls of the chateau since the day when he bent over his mother's deathbed, to which a hasty summons had called him from his regiment. The tie between the mother and son had been peculiarly close; as Madame Leroux had implied, the eldest son, heir and representative of the family, had, as it were, belonged exclusively to the father; but Alain was the mother's own, the one who reflected her views and disposition, the deepest source of gladness in her life. It had been a happy, sunny life, although she was married to a man much older than herself, and they had few tastes in common. Madame de St. Aignan wa...