: but I remember that she agreed to everything I had
arranged for her; she even smiled a sickly smile as I spoke of what an
ornament she would be to the belle cour,--and we parted.

"That was the last good-night I ever wished her. The next day she was
received at Court, and I was ordered to Normandy; thence I was sent to
Boulogne, and soon after to Ireland."

"But you have written to her,--you have heard from her?"

"Alas! no. I have written again and again; but either she has never
received my letters, or she will not answer them."

The tone of sorrow he concluded in left no room for any effort at
consolation, and we were silent; at last he took my hand in his, and as
his feverish fingers pressed it, he said,--"'T is a sad thing when we
work the misery of those for whose happiness we would have shed our
heart's blood."

CHAPTER X. THE CHURCHYARD

The excitement caused by the mere narration of his sister's suffering
weighed heavily on De Meudon's weak and exhausted frame. His thoughts
would flow in no other channel; his reveries were of home and long past
years; and a depression far greater than I had yet witnessed settled
down upon his jaded spirits.

"Is not my present condition like a just retribution on my ambitious
folly?" was his continued reflection. And so he felt it. With a
Frenchman's belief in destiny, he regarded the failure of all his
hopes, and the ruin of the cause he had embarked in, as the natural
and inevitable consequences of his own ungenerous conduct; and even
reproached himself for carrying his evil fortune into an enterprise
which, without him, might have been successful. These gloomy
forebodings, against which reason was of no avail, grew hourly upon him,
and visibly influenced his chances of recovery.

It was a sad spectacle to look on one who possessed so much of good, so
many fair and attractive qualities, thus wasting away without a single
consolation he could lay to his bruised and wounded spirit. The very
successes he once gloried to remember, now only added bitterness to his
fallen state. To think of what he had been, and look on what he was, was
his heaviest affliction; and he fell into deep, brooding melancholy, in
which he scarcely spoke, but sat looking at vacancy, waiting as it were
for death.

I remember it well. I had been sitting silently by his bedside; for
hours he had not spoken, but an occasional deep-drawn sigh showed he
was not sleeping. It was night, and all i