"Dubois? Are you sure? That is very singular" said her father.
"And he talked beautifully you say? It must be _this_ one."
"That is what I think" said Cecilia, seeing her father to the door.
Then ensued a period of hard work for Cecilia. She read the papers
assiduously, going up every day to the Parliamentary reading-rooms
for that purpose that she might lose no aspect of the affair. She
followed every detail of the rebellion, even possessing herself of
many of her father's papers bearing on the matter. Those details are
well known; how the whisper ran through our peaceful land, breathing
of war and battle and blood-shed; how our gallant men marched to the
front in as superb a faith and as perfect a manhood as ever troops
have shown in this country or the Old; how some fell by the way, and
how others were reserved to be clasped again to the bosoms of wife
and mother and how some met with the finest fate of all, or at least
the most fitting fate for a true soldier--death on the battle-field.
For a month the country was in a delirium. Then joy-bells rang, and
bonfires blazed, and hands were struck in other hands for very
delight that the cause of all the mischief, the rebel chief, the
traitor Dubois was taken. Cecilia alone sat in her room in horror.
"What will they do with the prisoner Dubois?" she said with a
vehemence that dismayed Sir Robert.
"The prisoner Dubois? Why, they will hang him of course. He has
caused too much blood to be shed not to have to give some of his own."
Cecilia writhed as if in extreme pain. Her beauty, her grace, her
youth all seemed to leave her in a moment, and she stood faded and
old before her father.
"Oh, they will not do that! Imprison him or send him away--anything,
anything save that! See, they do not know him--poor Pierre, so kind,
so good--they do not know him as I knew him. Father, he could not
hurt a thing--he would step aside from the smallest living thing in
the path when we walked together that summer, and he helped
everybody that wanted help, there was nothing he could not do. And
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