The Conscript

er her son's great fortune, she had denied herself the happiness of being with him; and when she read the rigorous laws in virtue of which th

ame of the horrible executions ordered by the Convention, she slept, happy in the knowledge that

dignity or her aristocratic tenets, and enveloped her sorrows in reserve and mystery. She had foreseen the difficulties that would beset her at Carentan. Did she not tempt the scaffold by the very fact of going thither to take a promin

the judges of the Revolutionary tribunals went there. The four first-named gentlemen were none of them married, and each paid court to he

as the most formidable of all her suitors. He alone knew the amount of the large fortune of his sometime client, and his fervor was inevitably increased by the cupidity of greed, and by the co