He became moody, sad, and disconsolate:  and as Josephine shunned him, so he avoided all the others, and wandered for hours by himself, perplexed and miserable.  After awhile, he became conscious that he was under a sort of surveillance.  Rose de Beaurepaire, who had been so kind to him when he was confined to his own room, but had taken little notice of him since he came down, now resumed her care of him, and evidently made it her business to keep up his heart.  She used to meet him out walking in a mysterious way, and in short, be always falling in with him and trying to cheer him up:  with tolerable success.

Such was the state of affairs when the party was swelled and matters complicated by the arrival of one we have lost sight of.

Edouard Riviere retarded his cure by an impatient spirit:  but he got well at last, and his uncle drove him in the cabriolet to his own quarters.  The news of the house had been told him by letter, but, of course, in so vague and general a way that, thinking he knew all, in reality he knew nothing.

Josephine had married Raynal.  The marriage was sudden, but no doubt there was an attachment:  he had some reason to believe in sudden attachments.  Colonel Dujardin, an old acquaintance, had come back to France wounded, and the good doctor had undertaken his cure:  this incident appeared neither strange nor any way important.  What affected him most deeply was the death of Raynal, his personal friend and patron.  But when his tyrants, as he called the surgeon and his uncle, gave him leave to go home, all feelings were overpowered by his great joy at the prospect of seeing Rose.  He walked over to Beaurepaire, his arm in a sling, his heart beating.  He was coming to receive the reward of all he had done, and all he had attempted.  “I will surprise them,” thought he.  “I will see her face when I come in at the door:  oh, happy hour! this pays for all.”  He entered the house without announcing himself; he went softly up to the saloon; to his great disappointment he found no one but the baroness:  she received him kindly, but not with the warmth he expected.  She was absorbed in her new grief.  He asked timidly after her daughters.  “Madame Raynal bears up, for the sake of others.  You will not, however, see her:  she keeps her room.  My daughter Rose is taking a walk, I believe.”  After some polite inquiries, and sympathy with his accident, the baroness retired to indulge her grief, and Edouard thus liberated ran in search of his beloved.

He met her at the gate of the Pleasaunce, but not alone.  She was walking with an officer, a handsome, commanding, haughty, brilliant officer.  She was walking by his side, talking earnestly to him.

An arrow of ice shot through young Riviere; and then came a feeling of death at his heart, a new symptom in his young life.

The next moment Rose caught sight of him.  She flushed all over and uttered a little exclamation, and she bounded towards him like a little antelope, and put out both her hands at once.  He could only give her one.