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IN DENIS DUVAL'S COUNTRY. 51
" There was no outcry any more. The little procession fell into an orderly rank, passed through the streets, and round the Protestant Church to the old burying ground behind the house of the Priory. The Rector walked between the two Roman Catholic clergymen. I imagine the scene before me now—the tramp of the people, the flicker of a torch or two ; and then we go in at the gate of the Priory ground into the old graveyard of the monastery, where a grave had been dug."
What Thackeray calls Sandgate is probably the Strandgate. Here it was that Denis used to drag in a little wheel-chair the baby Agnes, who afterwards became his wife. It was in one of these excursions that the Comte de Saverne, the day before the duel at Boulogne with La Motte— the fatal duel which ended his life—saw his child, the infant with which his wife had fled from her home. " O Agnes, Agnes ! How the years roll away! What strange events have befallen us : what passionate griefs have we had to suffer: what a merciful Heaven has protected us, since that day when your father knelt over the little car, in which his child lay sleeping! I have the picture in my mind now. I see a winding road |
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