For, day by day--almost hour by hour--it was his lot to listen to protestations of loyalty to a cause which smouldered none the less hotly because it was hidden from the sight of the Prince President's spies.
And, as Colville had predicted, Barebone sobered down.

He would ride now, hour after hour, in silence, whereas at the beginning of the journey he had talked gaily enough, seeing a hundred humorous incidents in the passing events of the day; laughing at the recollection of an interview with some provincial notable who had fallen behind the times, or jesting readily enough with such as showed a turn for joking on the road.
But now the unreality of his singular change of fortune was vanishing.
Every village priest who came after dark to take a glass of wine with them at their inn sent it farther into the past, every provincial noble greeting him on the step of his remote and quiet house added a note to the drumming reality which dominated his waking moments and disturbed his sleep at night.
Day by day they rode on, passing through two or three villages between such halts as were needed by the horses.

At every hamlet, in the large villages, where they rested and had their food, at the remote little town where they passed a night, there was always some one expecting them, who came and talked of the weather and more or less skilfully brought in the numeral nineteen.

"Nineteen! Nineteen!" It was a watchword all over France.
Long before, on the banks of the Dordogne, Loo had asked his companion why that word had been selected--what it meant.
"It means Louis XIX.," replied Dormer Colville, gravely.
And now, as they rode through a country so rural, so thinly populated and remote that nothing like it may be found in these crowded islands, the number seemed to follow them; or, rather, to pass on before them and await their coming.
Often Colville would point silently with his whip to the numerals, scrawled on a gate-post or written across a wall.

At this time France was mysteriously flooded with cheap portraits of the great Napoleon.
It was before the days of pictorial advertisement, and young ladies who wished to make an advantageous marriage had no means of advertising the fact and themselves in supplements to illustrated papers.