there, and now she is lost... lost!"

Tears followed; he hid his face in his hands, and for a few minutes he
said no more; he could not bear the sight of the room, which so short
a time ago had made a setting to a picture of the sweetest family
happiness. The winter dawn was struggling with the dying lamplight; the
tapers burned down to their paper-wreaths and flared out; everything was
all in keeping with the father's despair.

"This must be destroyed," he said after a pause, pointing to the
tambour-frame. "I shall never bear to see anything again that reminds us
of _her_!"

The terrible Christmas night when the Marquis and his wife lost their
oldest daughter, powerless to oppose the mysterious influence exercised
by the man who involuntarily, as it were, stole Helene from them, was
like a warning sent by Fate. The Marquis was ruined by the failure of
his stock-broker; he borrowed money on his wife's property, and lost
it in the endeavor to retrieve his fortunes. Driven to desperate
expedients, he left France. Six years went by. His family seldom had
news of him; but a few days before Spain recognized the independence of
the American Republics, he wrote that he was coming home.

So, one fine morning, it happened that several French merchants were on
board a Spanish brig that lay a few leagues out from Bordeaux, impatient
to reach their native land again, with wealth acquired by long years of
toil and perilous adventures in Venezuela and Mexico.

One of the passengers, a man who looked aged by trouble rather than
by years, was leaning against the bulwark netting, apparently quite
unaffected by the sight to be seen from the upper deck. The bright
day, the sense that the voyage was safely over, had brought all the
passengers above to greet their land. The larger number of them insisted
that they could see, far off in the distance, the houses and lighthouses
on the coast of Gascony and the Tower of Cardouan, melting into the
fantastic erections of white cloud along the horizon. But for the silver
fringe that played about their bows, and the long furrow swiftly effaced
in their wake, they might have been perfectly still in mid-ocean, so
calm was the sea. The sky was magically clear, the dark blue of the
vault above paled by imperceptible gradations, until it blended with
the bluish water, a gleaming line that sparkled like stars marking the
dividing line of sea. The sunlight caught myriads of facets over the
wide surfa