"Oh, but there are other things. Why should we talk of death or a prison?"
"Come here, Lucille." And Christine put her arm round her, and drew her to the window. "Isn't the city quiet to-night? It seems a sentient thing, awestruck and keeping silent because it knows that death is in it."
"I have known it as quiet other nights," the girl answered.
"What were your dreams then?"
"The Countess called them a silly girl's dreams, because I told her," said Lucille, a blush dyeing her fair face.
"Tell me. Perhaps I shall understand better."
"I wonder if you would! You know my little history—that I am the last of a family once rich and famous in Montvilliers. Long, long ago some ancestor of mine displeased some ancestor of yours, who was Duke then, and we lost honor and estates, and we have never risen again. Yet there has always been a legend that we should come to honor once more, and, strangely, that it should come through a woman. I am the only one left, so I dream."
"Of what?"
"Sometimes of a great deed that I shall do, and perhaps suffer for, but which shall make my name famous through all the world. And sometimes it is different."