Page:Cerise, a tale of the last century (IA cerisetaleoflast00whytrich).pdf/545

 a couple of labouring men brought in the body of a darkly-*clad foreign gentleman, who had lately been lodging at this roadside hostelry. They had found him half covered by a waning snow-wreath just under the wall in the "stell," said these honest dalesmen, below Borrodaile Rise. He must have been dead for days, but there was no difficulty in identifying the Abbé, for the frozen element in which he was wrapped had kept off the very taint of death, and preserved him, to use their own language, "in uncommon fettle, to be sure!" Except the Marquise, I doubt if any one regretted him, and yet it seemed a strange and piteous fate for the gifted scholar, the able churchman, the polished courtier, thus to perish by breaking his neck off a Yorkshire mare on a Yorkshire moor.

"Men are so different!" observed Cerise, as she and George discussed the Abbé's death, and, indeed, his character, walking together through the park, after the snow was gone, in the soft air of a mild winter's day, nowhere so calm and peaceful as in our English climate.

"And women, too," replied George, looking fondly in the dear face he had loved all his life, and thinking that her like could only be found amongst the angels in heaven.

Cerise shook her head.

"You know nothing about us," said she. "My own, how blind you must have been when you went away and left me nothing of your cruel self but a riding-glove."

He laughed, no doubt well pleased.

"It was you, then, who had taken it? I looked for it everywhere, and was forced to go away without it."

"You did not look here," she answered, and warm from the whitest bosom in the world she drew the missing glove that had lain there ever since the night he left her.

"George," she added, and the love-light in her eyes betrayed her feelings no less than the low, soft accents of her voice, "you know now that I prize your little finger more than all the rest of the world. I never saw another face than yours that I cared twice to look upon, and it is my happiness, my pride, to think that I was never loved by any man on earth but you!"

She raised her head and looked around in triumph while she spoke. Her eye, resting on the church of the distant