Page:The Czar, A Tale of the Time of the First Napleon.djvu/105

Rh One such nook—a little pastoral village not a hundred miles from Paris—had in its immediate neighbourhood a spot yet more secluded, where a noble family of the "old régime," who otherwise might have wandered homeless exiles from their native land, found a welcome refuge. The simple four-roomed cottage, with the vine trained over its tiny porch, would have been an unpretending dwelling for the village smith or carpenter. Yet few could have looked on it attentively, even from the outside, and none could have entered it, without feeling sure that its inmates inherited the traditions of centuries of refinement and cultivation.

The morning sun of one of the earliest days of 1812 was streaming into the little porch. The weather was mild and beautiful—unusually so for the season. One person was enjoying it thoroughly—a lad of about seventeen, who reclined in the porch, intent upon a book, while the sunshine streamed brightly over him, and the breeze gently lifted his soft brown hair. The expression of his face was rather sweet than strong—his forehead was good, his eyes large and dark, his mouth well-formed and sensitive, but lacking as yet the look of resolution that might come with riper manhood.

So absorbed was he in his book that he did not hear an approaching footstep; but then it was a very light one. The young girl who came out from the parlour to join her brother was his senior by a year, and looked even more. She was tall, but her slight figure was well formed and graceful. Her eyes were dark, like her brother's; and her hair a glossy brown, very fine and soft. It did not wave or float, but was neatly coiled about a head which might have served a sculptor for his model. There was no weakness in the delicate lines of her face, though there was much tenderness. Her complexion was pale; but there was in her cheek a hint of possible colour, which came and went with every passing emotion. No one thought of calling Clémence de Talmont pretty, but in the