CHAPTER III.
THE STORM.
The dawn of the following day was dark and gloomy, and as every one knew that the promenade was set down in the royal programme, every one's gaze, as his eyes were opened, was directed toward the sky.

Just above the tops of the trees a thick, suffocating vapor seemed to remain suspended, with hardly sufficient power to rise thirty feet above the ground under the influence of the sun's rays, which could barely be seen through the veil of a heavy and thick mist.

No dew had fallen in the morning; the turf was dried up for want of moisture, the flowers were withered.

The birds sung less inspiritingly than usual amid the boughs, which remained as motionless as death.

The strange confused and animated murmurs, which seemed born of, and to exist by the sun, that respiration of nature which is unceasingly heard amid all other sounds, could not be heard now, and never had the silence been so profound.