Page:Helen Leah Reed - Napoleons young neighbour.djvu/27

Rh "So they send him here?" It was Mr. Balcombe who first spoke.

"Yes; no spot in Europe can hold him. Even on Elba he had begun to establish a kingdom. He reached beyond that little island, and now he has had his Waterloo."

"It is clear, then," said Mr. Balcombe, "why they have sent him here. This is a natural fortress and it belongs to England."

"Yes," said the officer; "England knows that here, in her keeping, Bonaparte will never again escape to torment the world."

After a few more words of explanation on the one hand and of surprise on the other, the visitors withdrew. Of those who had listened to the officer young Elizabeth, or Betsy as she was commonly called, was the most disturbed. She shivered and turned pale, and her mother, noticing her agitation, soon sent her to bed. There she silently wept herself to sleep and her dreams were filled with visions of that dreadful ogre, Bonaparte. It was not a very long time since she had really believed Napoleon to be a huge monster, a kind of Polyphemus with one large, flaming eye in the middle