“O monsieur!” exclaimed the poor girl in her confusion, her best French failing, “it was nothing—­no living man.”

“Can mademoiselle assure me of that?  The dead I fear not, the living I would defy.”

“He lives not,” said she in an undertone, with a shudder.

“But who is he that mademoiselle can be so certain?” asked the Frenchman.

“Oh!  I know him well enough,” said Anne, unable to control her voice.

“Mademoiselle must explain herself,” said M. de Lauzun.  “If he be spirit—­or phantom—­there is no more to say, but if he be in the flesh, and a spy—­then—­” There was a little rattle of his sword.

“Speak, I command,” interposed the Queen; “you must satisfy M. le Comte.”

Thus adjured, Anne said in a low voice of horror:  “It was a gentleman of our neighbourhood; he was killed in a duel last summer!”

“Ah!  You are certain?”

“I had the misfortune to see the fight,” sighed Anne.

“That accounts for it,” said the Queen kindly.  “If mademoiselle’s nerves were shaken by such a remembrance, it is not wonderful that it should recur to her at so strange a watch as we have been keeping.”

“It might account for her seeing this revenant cavalier in any passenger,” said Lauzun, not satisfied yet.

“No one ever was like him,” said Anne.  “I could not mistake him.”

“May I ask mademoiselle to describe him?” continued the count.

Feeling all the time as if this first mention were a sort of betrayal, Anne faltered the words:  “Small, slight, almost misshapen—­with a strange one-sided look—­odd, unusual features.”

Lauzun’s laugh jarred on her.  “Eh! it is not a flattering portrait.  Mademoiselle is not haunted by a hero of romance, it appears, so much as by a demon.”

“And none of those monsieur has employed in our escape answer to that description?” asked the Queen.

“Assuredly not, your Majesty.  Crooked person and crooked mind go together, and St. Victor would only have trusted to your big honest rowers of the Tamise.  I think we may be satisfied that the demoiselle’s imagination was excited so as to evoke a phantom impressed on her mind by a previous scene of terror.  Such things have happened in my native Gascony.”

Anne was fain to accept the theory in silence, though it seemed to her strange that at a moment when she was for once not thinking of Peregrine, her imagination should conjure him up, and there was a strong feeling within her that it was something external that had flitted across the shadow, not a mere figment of her brain, though the notion was evidently accepted, and she could hear a muttering of Mrs. Labadie that this was the consequence of employing young wenches with their whims and megrims.

The Count de Lauzun did his best to entertain the Queen with stories of revenants in Gascony and elsewhere, and with reminiscences of his eleven years’ captivity at Pignerol, and his intercourse with Fouquet; but whenever in aftertimes Anne Woodford tried to recall her nocturnal drive with this strange personage, the chosen and very unkind husband of the poor old Grande Mademoiselle, she never could recollect anything but the fierce glare of his eyes in the light of the lamps as he put her to that terrible interrogation.