nephew to his chamber there!And burn Monsieur my nephew in

his bed, if you will,” he added to himself, before he rang his little

bell again, and summoned his valet to his own bedroom.

The valet come and gone, Monsieur the Marquis walked to and

fro in his loose chamber-robe, to prepare himself gently for sleep,

that hot still night. Rustling about the room, his softly-slippered

feet making no noise on the floor, he moved like a refined tiger:

looked like some enchanted marquis of the impenitently wicked

sort, in story, whose periodical change into tiger form was either

just going off, or just coming on.

He moved from end to end of his voluptuous bed room, looking

again at the scraps of the day’s journey that came unbidden into

his mind; the slow toil up the hill at sunset, the setting sun, the

descent, the mill, the prison on the crag, the little village in the

hollow, the peasants at the fountain, and the mender of roads with

his blue cap pointing out the chain under the carriage. That

fountain suggested the Paris fountain, the little bundle lying on

the step, the woman bending over it, and the tall man with his

arms up, crying, “Dead!”

“I am cool now,” said Monsieur the Marquis, “and may go to

bed.”

So, leaving only one light burning on the large hearth, he let his

thin gauze curtains fall around him, and heard the night break its

silence with a long sigh as he composed himself to sleep.

Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics

The stone faces on the outer walls stared blindly at the black

night for three heavy hours; for three heavy hours, the horses in

the stables rattled at their racks, the dogs barked, and the owl

made a noise with very little resemblance in it to the noise

conventionally assigned to the owl by men-poets. But it is the

obstinate custom of such creatures hardly ever to say what is set

down for them.

For three heavy hours, the stone faces of the chateau, lion and

human, stared blindly at the night. Dead darkness lay on all the

landscape, dead darkness added its own hush to the hushing dust

on all the roads. The burial-place had got to the pass that its little

heaps of poor grass were undistinguishable from one another; the

figure on the Cross might have come down, for anything that could

be seen of it. In the village: taxers and taxed were fast asleep.

Dreaming, perhaps, of banquets, as the starved usually do, and of

ease and rest, as the driven slave and the yoked ox may, its lean

inhabitants slept soundly, and were fed and freed.

The fountain in the village flowed unseen and unheard, and the

fountain at the chateau dropped unseen and unheardboth

melting away, like the minutes that were falling from the spring of

Timethrough three dark hours. Then, the grey water of both

began to be ghostly in the light, and the eyes of the stone faces of

the chateau were opened.

Lighter and lighter, until at last the sun touched the tops of the

still trees, and poured its radiance over the hill. In the glow, the