It was not his first visit to the country.

Sixty years earlier he had been hurried thither by a frenzied mother, a little pale-faced boy, not bright or clever, but destined to pass through days of trial and years of sorrow which the bright and clever would scarcely have survived.

For brightness must always mean friction, while cleverness will continue to butt its head against human limitations so long as men shall walk this earth.
He had been induced to make this journey thus, in the evening of his days, by the Hope, hitherto vain enough, which many Frenchmen had pursued for half a century.

For he was one of those who refused to believe that Louis XVII.

had died in the prison of the Temple.
Not once, but many times, Dormer Colville laughingly denied any responsibility in the matter.
"I will not even tell the story as it was told to me," he said to the Marquis de Gemosac, to the Abbe Touvent and to the Comtesse de Chantonnay, whom he met frequently enough at the house of his cousin, Mrs.St.Pierre Lawrence, in that which is now the Province of the Charente Inferieure.