The bitter chill of a Parisian autumn, the gnawings of half-satisfied hunger, the thick walls that shut out all hope of escape but did not exclude those fearful cries that lasted with few intervals throughout the night, made it like some hideous dream.

At last the morning broke; at half-past two o'clock, some members of the _commune_ presented themselves in the hall of the National Assembly with the significant announcement:--"The prisons are empty!" and Antoine, who had been quaking for hours, took courage, and went with half a loaf of bread and a pitcher of water to the cell that was not "empty." He found his prisoner struggling with a knot of white ribbon, which he was trying to fasten in his hair.

One glance at his face told all.
"It is the fever," said Antoine; and he put down the bread and water and fetched an old blanket and a pillow; and that day and for many days, the gaoler hung above his prisoner's pallet with the tenderness of a woman.

Was he haunted by the vision of a burly figure that had bent over his own sick bed in the Rue de la Croix?
Did the voice (once so familiar in counsel and benediction!) echo still in his ears?
"_The blessing of a dying priest upon you if you do well, and his curse if you do ill to this poor child, whose home was my home in better days._" Be this as it may, Antoine tended his patient with all the constancy compatible with keeping his presence in the prison a secret; and it was not till the crisis was safely past, that he began to visit the cell less frequently, and reassumed the harsh manners which he held to befit his office.
Monsieur the Viscount's mind rambled much in his illness.

He called for his mother, who had long been dead.