The Yellow Poppy

May had given place to June before Valentine de Trélan had quite got accustomed to the departure of the handsome boy whose presence had been such an anxiety and yet such a pleas...

She had no time for thought of her surroundings. Gaston, warned by the opening of the door, was waiting just inside, and she was in his arms, strained to him, clinging to him, b...

And now at last the West was really ablaze, and in a few days, as department after department lit up with the carefully prepared flame, the Republicans began to suffer more seri...

The morning that the Duchesse de Trélan was led through the show portions of her own mansion by the former caretaker, to be initiated into what she was to point out to others, w...

If, owing to the slackness of the once fire-eating Grégoire and his superior, Roland’s apparition in the gardens of Mirabel had produced but little stir in official quarters, it...

“I could wish,” he observed, “that they had departed earlier—or at least that young La Vergne had done so, before he brought about what happened last night, by his mention of th...

All this while the occupants of M. Charlot’s attic, which the Abbé had so abruptly quitted, were taken up with their own anxieties, and though they had at last fallen silent, th...

Lucien du Boisfossé and Artamène de la Vergne would not have been themselves—particularly Artamène—if they had not remarked, during the next few days, that a state of curious re...

“I must do something, Suzon, to pass the time till I start for the Temple. I cannot go out; Paris hurts me. And, sewing once more in this room, I shall feel I am back in the old...

But the strange twist of Fortune’s wheel which, nine years after her husband’s departure, had brought the Duchesse de Trélan as concierge to her own palace, was first set in mot...

It was Hyde de Neuville, half beside himself with grief and fury, who brought the Comte de Brencourt the news, which at ten o’clock the young conspirator had only just heard, an...

For if his sincere penitence had caused his grandfather to dismiss him in the end with a sort of blessing—a remark that he was, if crazy and disobedient, at least no milksop—the...

Thousands of years before, the ancient and forgotten race, drowned now in the mists of time, which had set up in those parts the long ranks of menhirs on the lande, had raised i...

It is doubtful if the Comte de Brencourt realised how his false tidings about her husband would sweep out of Mme de Trélan’s head almost all thought of himself, his proximity an...

The general belief that the Duchesse de Trélan, thrown into prison when Mirabel was sacked, had shared the terrible fate of the Princesse de Lamballe, though it was unfounded, h...

By very hard going the four riders got to Quimperlé that night, despite the state of the roads. They slept there entirely unmolested; a small detachment of troops indeed occupie...

It was about six o’clock the next morning that old Bernard, who had just finished dressing himself, looked out of the window of the little ground-floor room in the Palace of the...

About the time that the contents of Lucien’s pot were becoming only a tough memory, the Marquis de Kersaint was standing, with his hands behind his back, looking out through the...

And next door, in a tidy but overcrowded bedroom, the Abbé Chassin, without any of the marks of his office, sat and listened to the babbling of an old spinster lady who was to t...

Not Artamène de la Vergne himself had received the command to boot and saddle, which set the Clos-aux-Grives in such a pleasurable commotion at sunrise that morning, more jubila...

About midnight on the 14th of February—her name-day, which the ladies of La Vergne had celebrated, though with heavy hearts, by a little feast—Mme de Trélan was awakened by a co...

So it was Roland, now openly betrothed to Marthe, who came to La Vergne a week later, bringing Gaston’s letter announcing that the die was cast, and it was Roland who told Valen...

From the clump of pines on the rise the view down the Allée des Vieilles, with the sunset light on it, was extensive, and figures half a mile away were tolerably clear. The Comt...

Versailles, Dreux, Alençon, Rennes, Pontivy—like beads on a chaplet they had slid past Valentine de Trélan, like locks on a smooth river or canal, opened for her by that bit of...

“_Le vin est versé; il faut le boire._” The words of the old adage rang in Valentine’s head to-night. Not long ago Gaston had quoted them. She had never before so felt their ine...

In spite of the bare six miles which separated it from Paris in spite of its position only a little off the high-road there-from to Saint-Germain-en-Laye, a great peace reigned...

sang Marthe de la Vergne to the harpsichord in her light sweet voice. The strains floated through the open salon window to Valentine de Trélan as she sat outside in the Septembe...

The Abbé Chassin, who lived to be a very old man, left among his papers a full record of most of the events connected with the death of the Duc de Trélan, but no word of that sh...

When the _laitière_ came at half-past six that morning she was sorry to hear that Mme Vidal was indisposed, but not ill-pleased to sell her, in consequence, a double portion of...

The brief but acrimonious interview of M. de Brencourt and M. Chassin had scarcely terminated when Roland de Céligny emerged from his leader’s bedroom to the outer room. He shut...

The dawn was slipping a slim, cool hand into the strangely populated attic, and the grey light invested furniture and sleepers alike with quite a different appearance from last...

Three days later, about sunset, the Duchesse de Trélan, her long dead predecessor’s rubies heavy, warm, and invisible about her neck, stood in the great Salle Verte, probably fo...

It was soon plain to Gaston de Trélan that, between bodily pain and mental turmoil, sleep was not likely to visit him much that night. He would, at least, keep that fact from Pi...

Valentine de Trélan was kneeling before her crucifix ere retiring to bed when she heard the first shot. The report broke so sharply across her prayers that, like a noise heard i...

The chapel at Mirabel, of later date than the château itself, was one of those lofty, pompous, rococo edifices abounding in heavy wood-carving, and puffy-cheeked cherubs, and tr...

“You may think yourself lucky to have a bed to make!” retorted a comrade who sat cross-legged on a neighbouring pile of sacking. “Mine cannot be ‘made,’ though a careless moveme...

A trifle of agitation might easily have been excused in any prospective caretaker confronted for the first time by the château of Mirabel. Since there was, on this side of it, n...

It was Lucien who rode to Lanvennec next morning for the surgeon. M. de Brencourt considered him discreet, and chose him rather than Artamène (who had besides been up all night)...

Not until that evening did Roland’s exact words about the aumônier recur to Mme de Trélan’s memory. Who could she have been, the dying old lady who possessed this mysterious doc...

They went at first through deep lanes, scarcely wide enough to ride abreast, where they lost sight of their goal, then, mounting a rise of sandy turf, came on it spread glorious...

It may be doubted whether, after all, Roland de Céligny really regretted exchanging Ares for Aphrodite. He hardly knew himself, as he journeyed with his injured friend by discre...

It was not until Valentine’s letter of resignation had gone that she realised what, in the heat of her anger, she had done. She had shut herself out of Mirabel for ever. To-morr...

Up in the Marquis de Kersaint’s room M. Pierre Chassin, priest and plotter, tired as he was, had been for some time pacing uneasily up and down. He had just returned from the mo...

Two nights later, in the dark and the cold, they drove into Vannes—Valentine, Roland and the Comte de Brencourt—having left Mme de la Vergne at Hennebont as they passed through,...

Because it was both midday and high summer, the thrushes that gave its pretty name to the old farmhouse of Le Clos-aux-Grives, near Lanvennec in Finistère, were not singing; and...

Thus it was that Roland de Céligny’s exit from Mirabel was not so speedily effected as his hostess had planned. And without Suzon Tessier it is doubtful whether it would have be...

“And so, self-girded with torn strips of hope, Took up his life, as if it were for death (Just capable of one heroic aim), And threw it in the thickest of the world.”

I. M. THIBAULT IN CONVERSATION 63 II. LE PALAIS DE FAIENCE 71 III. NINE YEARS—AND BEYOND 78 IV. JADIS 88 V. THE JASPER CUP 99 VI. THE ROMAUNT OF ROLAND 111 VII. CHILDE ROLAND CO...

I. FULFILMENT 315 II. THE YELLOW POPPY 324 III. THE COST OF ANSWERED PRAYER 331 IV. WAR . . . AND TREATIES 340 V. ALONE IN ARMS 353 VI. “SWORD, THY NOBLER USE IS DONE!” 362 VII....

Parted. Face no more, Voice no more, love no more! wiped wholly out Like some ill scholar’s scrawl from heart and slate,— Aye, spit on and so wiped out utterly By some coarse sc...

I. THE COURT OF CHARLEMAGNE 209 II. M. DE KERSAINT ANSWERS FOR A KINSMAN 215 III. M. DE KERSAINT ANSWERS FOR HIMSELF 225 IV. A MOONLIGHT WALK IN THE FOREST 236 V. WHAT THE ABBÉ...

“But oh, the night! oh! bitter-sweet, oh, sweet! O dark, O moon and stars, O ecstasy Of darkness! O great mystery of love,— In which absorbed, loss, anguish, treason’s self Enla...