‘Don’t come!’ Had it been added by this unknown uncle of mine on account of some sudden change in his plans?  Surely that was inconceivable, for why in that case should he send the invitation at all?  Or was it placed there by some one else who wished to warn me from accepting this offer of hospitality?  The letter was in French.  The warning was in English.  Could it have been added in England?  But the seals were unbroken, and how could any one in England know what were the contents of the letter?

And then, as I sat there with the big sail humming like a shell above my head and the green water hissing beside me, I thought over all that I had heard of this uncle of mine.  My father, the descendant of one of the proudest and oldest families in France, had chosen beauty and virtue rather than rank in his wife.  Never for an hour had she given him cause to regret it; but this lawyer brother of hers had, as I understood, offended my father by his slavish obsequiousness in days of prosperity and his venomous enmity in the days of trouble.  He had hounded on the peasants until my family had been compelled to fly from the country, and had afterwards aided Robespierre in his worst excesses, receiving as a reward the castle and estate of Grosbois, which was our own.  At the fall of Robespierre he had succeeded in conciliating Barras, and through every successive change he still managed to gain a fresh tenure of the property.  Now it appeared from his letter that the new Emperor of France had also taken his part, though why he should befriend a man with such a history, and what service my Republican uncle could possibly render to him, were matters upon which I could form no opinion.

And now you will ask me, no doubt, why I should accept the invitation of such a man—­a man whom my father had always stigmatised as a usurper and a traitor.  It is easier to speak of it now than then, but the fact was that we of the new generation felt it very irksome and difficult to carry on the bitter quarrels of the last.  To the older emigres the clock of time seemed to have stopped in the year 1792, and they remained for ever with the loves and the hatreds of that era fixed indelibly upon their souls.  They had been burned into them by the fiery furnace through which they had passed.  But we, who had grown up upon a strange soil, understood that the world had moved, and that new issues had arisen.  We were inclined to forget these feuds of the last generation.  France to us was no longer the murderous land of the sans-culotte and the guillotine basket; it was rather the glorious queen of war, attacked by all and conquering all, but still so hard pressed that her scattered sons could hear her call to arms for ever sounding in their ears.  It was that call more than my uncle’s letter which was taking me over the waters of the Channel.