And if it should be in the
blood--if Teresa's children--dreadful thought!"

De Montaigne ceased, thoroughly overcome.

"Do not, my dear friend, so fearfully exaggerate your misfortune,
great as it is; Cesarini's disease evidently arose from no physical
conformation,--it was but the crisis, the development, of a
long-contracted malady of mind, passions morbidly indulged, the
reasoning faculty obstinately neglected; and yet too he may recover. The
further memory recedes from the shock he has sustained, the better the
chance that his mind will regain its tone."

De Montaigne wrung his friend's hand.

"It is strange that from you should come sympathy and comfort!--you whom
he so injured; you whom his folly or his crime drove from your proud
career, and your native soil! But Providence will yet, I trust, redeem
the evil of its erring creature, and I shall yet live to see you
restored to hope and home, a happy husband, an honoured citizen. Till
then, I feel as if the curse lingered upon my race."

"Speak not thus. Whatever my destiny, I have recovered from that wound;
and still, De Montaigne, I find in life that suffering succeeds to
suffering, and disappointment to disappointment, as wave to wave. To
endure is the only philosophy; to believe that we shall live again in a
brighter planet, is the only hope that our reason should accept from our
desires."

CHAPTER II.

MONSTRA evenerunt mihi:
Introit in aedes ater alienus canis,
Anguis per impluvium decidit de tegulis,
Gallina cecinit!*--TERENCE.

* "Prodigies have occurred: a strange black dog came into the house;
a snake glided from the tiles, through the court; the hen crowed."

WITH his constitutional strength of mind, and conformably with his
acquired theories, Maltravers continued to struggle against the latest
and strongest passion of his life. It might be seen in the paleness of
his brow, and that nameless expression of suffering which betrays
itself in the lines about the mouth, that his health was affected by the
conflict within him; and many a sudden fit of absence and abstraction,
many an impatient sigh, followed by a forced and unnatural gayety, told
the observant Valerie that he was the prey of a sorrow he was too proud
to disclose. He compelled himself, however, to take, or to affect,
an interest in the singular phenomena of the social state around
him,--phenomena that, in a happier or serener mood, would indeed have
suggested no or