s love affairs.

"Leave me to myself," he said to his faithful friend.

As the lieutenant closed the door, the unhappy father threw himself on a
sofa, with his head in his hands, weeping those slow, scanty tears which
suffuse the eyes of a man of sixty, but do not fall,--tears soon dried,
yet quick to start again,--the last dews of the human autumn.

"To have children, to have a wife, to adore them--what is it but to have
many hearts and bare them to a dagger?" he cried, springing up with the
bound of a tiger and walking up and down the room. "To be a father is
to give one's self over, bound hand and foot to sorrow. If I meet that
D'Estourny I will kill him. To have daughters!--one gives her life to a
scoundrel, the other, my Modeste, falls a victim to whom? a coward, who
deceives her with the gilded paper of a poet. If it were Canalis himself
it might not be so bad; but that Scapin of a lover!--I will strangle him
with my two hands," he cried, making an involuntary gesture of furious
determination. "And what then? suppose my Modeste were to die of grief?"

He gazed mechanically out of the windows of the hotel des Princes, and
then returned to the sofa, where he sat motionless. The fatigues of
six voyages to India, the anxieties of speculation, the dangers he
had encountered and evaded, and his many griefs, had silvered Charles
Mignon's head. His handsome soldierly face, so pure in outline and now
bronzed by the suns of China and the southern seas, had acquired an air
of dignity which his present grief rendered almost sublime.

"Mongenod told me he felt confidence in the young man who is coming to
ask me for my daughter," he thought at last; and at this moment Ernest
de La Briere was announced by one of the servants whom Monsieur de La
Bastie had attached to himself during the last four years.

"You have come, monsieur, from my friend Mongenod?" he said.

"Yes," replied Ernest, growing timid when he saw before him a face as
sombre as Othello's. "My name is Ernest de La Briere, related to the
family of the late cabinet minister, and his private secretary during
his term of office. On his dismissal, his Excellency put me in the Court
of Claims, to which I am legal counsel, and where I may possibly succeed
as chief--"

"And how does all this concern Mademoiselle de La Bastie?" asked the
count.

"Monsieur, I love her; and I have the unhoped-for happiness of being
loved by her. Hear me, monsieur," cried Ernest, chec