Now it signified no more to me than to offer the
transition I required.
'My dear friends,' I said--'for you must allow me to call you that,
who have no others within so many hundred leagues--perhaps you will
think me fanciful and sentimental; and perhaps indeed I am; but
there is one service that I would beg of you before all others.
You see me set here on the top of this rock in the midst of your
city. Even with what liberty I have, I have the opportunity to see
a myriad roofs, and I dare to say, thirty leagues of sea and land.
All this hostile! Under all these roofs my enemies dwell; wherever
I see the smoke of a house rising, I must tell myself that some one
sits before the chimney and reads with joy of our reverses. Pardon
me, dear friends, I know that you must do the same, and I do not
grudge at it! With you, it is all different. Show me your house
then, were it only the chimney, or, if that be not visible, the
quarter of the town in which it lies! So, when I look all about
me, I shall be able to say: "THERE IS ONE HOUSE IN WHICH I AM NOT
QUITE UNKINDLY THOUGHT OF."'
Flora stood a moment.
'It is a pretty thought,' said she, 'and, as far as regards Ronald
and myself, a true one. Come, I believe I can show you the very
smoke out of our chimney.'
So saying, she carried me round the battlements towards the
opposite or southern side of the fortress, and indeed to a bastion
almost immediately overlooking the place of our projected flight.
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