“You have not seen the Orange Room, Miss Dorothea?”

“Not since the decorations began.”  She paused and uttered the thought uppermost in her mind.  “You must forgive my brother; I am sorry he spoke as he did just now.”

“Then he is more than forgiven.”

“He did not consider.”

“Dear Mademoiselle, your brother is an excellent fellow, and not a bit more popular than he deserves to be.  Of his kindness to us prisoners—­ I speak not of us privileged ones, but of our poorer brothers—­I could name a thousand acts; and acts say more than words.”

Dorothea pursed her lips.  “I am not sure.  I think a woman would ask for words too.”

“Yes, that is so,” he caught her up.  “But don’t you see that we prisoners are—­forgive me—­just like women?  I mean, we have learned that we are weak.  For a man that is no easy lesson, Mademoiselle.  I myself learned it hardly.  And seeing your brother admired by all, so strong and prosperous and confident, can I ask that he should feel as we who have forfeited these things?”

Before she could find a reply he had harked back to the Orange Room.

“You have not seen it since the decorations began?  Then I have a mind to run and ask your brother to forbid your coming—­to command you to wait until Wednesday.  We are in a horrible mess, I warn you, and smell of turpentine most potently.  But we shall be ready for the ball, and then—!  It will be prodigious.  You do not know that we have a genius at work on the painting?”

“My brother tells me the designs are extraordinarily clever.”

“They are more than clever, you will allow.  The artist I discovered myself—­a young man named Charles Raoul.  He comes from the South, a little below Avignon, and of good family—­in some respects.”  The General paused and took snuff.  “He enlisted at eighteen and has seen service; he tells me he was wounded at Austerlitz.  Unhappily he was shipped, about two years ago, on board the Thetis frigate, with a detachment and stores for Martinique.  The Thetis had scarcely left L’Orient before she fell in with one of your frigates, whose name escapes me; and here he is in Axcester.  He has rich relatives, but for some reason or other they decline to support him; and yet he seems a gentleman.  He picks up a few shillings by painting portraits; but you English are shy of sitting—­I wonder why?  And we—­well, I suppose we prefer to wait till our faces grow happier.”

Dorothea had it on the tip of her tongue to ask how the General had discovered this genius; but the ring in his voice gave her pause.  Twice in the course of their short walk he had shown feeling; and she wondered at it, having hitherto regarded him as a cynical old fellow with a wit which cracked himself and the world like two dry nuts for the jest of their shrivelled kernels.  She did not, know that a kind word of hers had unlocked his heart; and before she could recall her question they had reached the stable-yard of “The Dogs.”  And after stabling Mercury it was but a step across to the inn.