“Remember that you see me after a long freedom from anxiety.  Since I have lived here, I have gone to rest at night, and have not been afraid of the morning,” replied Trudaine.  He went out into the passage while he spoke, and called at the foot of the one flight of stairs which the cottage possessed, “Rose!  Rose! come down!  The friend whom you most wished to see has arrived at last.”

She answered the summons immediately.  The frank, friendly warmth of her greeting; her resolute determination, after the first inquiries were over, to help the guest to take off his upper coat with her own hands, so confused and delighted Lomaque, that he hardly knew which way to turn, or what to say.

“This is even more trying, in a pleasant way, to a lonely old fellow like me,” he was about to add, “than the unexpected civility of the hot cup of coffee years ago”; but remembering what recollections even that trifling circumstance might recall, he checked himself.

“More trying than what?” asked Rose, leading him to a chair.

“Ah!  I forget.  I am in my dotage already!” he answered, confusedly.  “I have not got used just yet to the pleasure of seeing your kind face again.”  It was indeed a pleasure to look at that face now, after Lomaque’s last experience of it.  Three years of repose, though they had not restored to Rose those youthful attractions which she had lost forever in the days of the Terror, had not passed without leaving kindly outward traces of their healing progress.  Though the girlish roundness had not returned to her cheeks, or the girlish delicacy of color to her complexion, her eyes had recovered much of their old softness, and her expression all of its old winning charm.  What was left of latent sadness in her face, and of significant quietness in her manner, remained gently and harmlessly—­remained rather to show what had been once than what was now.

When they were all seated, there was, however, something like a momentary return to the suspense and anxiety of past days in their faces, as Trudaine, looking earnestly at Lomaque, asked, “Do you bring any news from Paris?”

“None,” he replied; “but excellent news, instead, from Rouen.  I have heard, accidentally, through the employer whom I have been serving since we parted, that your old house by the river-side is to let again.”

Rose started from her chair.  “Oh, Louis, if we could only live there once more!  My flower-garden?” she continued to Lomaque.

“Cultivated throughout,” he answered, “by the late proprietor.”

“And the laboratory?” added her brother.

“Left standing,” said Lomaque.  “Here is a letter with all the particulars.  You may depend upon them, for the writer is the person charged with the letting of the house.”

Trudaine looked over the letter eagerly.

“The price is not beyond our means,” he said.  “After our three years’ economy here, we can afford to give something for a great pleasure.”