an feeling as if the
door of a sepulchre had suddenly been opened, and the damp darkness were
being exhaled.

"You see I have come back," he said. "I have come to try again."

"It would be ridiculous," said M. de Bellegarde, "to pretend that we are
glad to see you or that we don't question the taste of your visit."

"Oh, don't talk about taste," said Newman, with a laugh, "or that will
bring us round to yours! If I consulted my taste I certainly shouldn't
come to see you. Besides, I will make as short work as you please.
Promise me to raise the blockade--to set Madame de Cintre at
liberty--and I will retire instantly."

"We hesitated as to whether we would see you," said Madame de
Bellegarde; "and we were on the point of declining the honor. But it
seemed to me that we should act with civility, as we have always done,
and I wished to have the satisfaction of informing you that there are
certain weaknesses that people of our way of feeling can be guilty of
but once."

"You may be weak but once, but you will be audacious many times,
madam," Newman answered. "I didn't come however, for conversational
purposes. I came to say this, simply: that if you will write immediately
to your daughter that you withdraw your opposition to her marriage, I
will take care of the rest. You don't want her to turn nun--you know
more about the horrors of it than I do. Marrying a commercial person is
better than that. Give me a letter to her, signed and sealed, saying you
retract and that she may marry me with your blessing, and I will take
it to her at the convent and bring her out. There's your chance--I call
those easy terms."

"We look at the matter otherwise, you know. We call them very hard
terms," said Urbain de Bellegarde. They had all remained standing
rigidly in the middle of the room. "I think my mother will tell you that
she would rather her daughter should become Soeur Catherine than Mrs.
Newman."

But the old lady, with the serenity of supreme power, let her son make
her epigrams for her. She only smiled, almost sweetly, shaking her head
and repeating, "But once, Mr. Newman; but once!"

Nothing that Newman had ever seen or heard gave him such a sense of
marble hardness as this movement and the tone that accompanied it.
"Could anything compel you?" he asked. "Do you know of anything that
would force you?"

"This language, sir," said the marquis, "addressed to people in
bereavement and grief is beyond all qualification."