e. He well understood the sort of tacit bargain that his mother
had made with him. She had seen her advantage in his loathing of the
proposed union with Tressan, and she had used it to the full. Either he
must compel Valerie to wed him this side of Saturday or resign himself
to see his mother--his beautiful, peerless mother--married to this skin
of lard that called itself a man.

Living, he had never entertained for his father a son's respect, nor,
dead, did he now reverence his memory as becomes a son. But in that
hour, as he sat at table, facing this gross wooer of his mother's, his
eyes were raised to the portrait of the florid-visaged haughty Marquis
de Condillac, where it looked down upon them from the panelled wall, and
from his soul he offered up to that portrait of his dead sire an apology
for the successor whom his widow destined him.

He ate little, but drank great draughts, as men will when their mood
is sullen and dejected, and the heat of the wine, warming his veins and
lifting from him some of the gloom that had settled over him, lent him
anon a certain recklessness very different from the manner of his sober
moments.

Chancing suddenly to raise his eyes from the cup into which he had been
gazing, absorbed as gazes a seer into his crystal, he caught on the
Seneschal's lips so odious a smile, in the man's eyes so greedy, hateful
a leer as he bent them on the Marquise, that he had much ado not to
alter the expression of that flabby face by hurling at it the cup he
held.

He curbed himself; he smiled sardonically upon the pair; and in that
moment he swore that be the cost what it might, he would frustrate the
union of those two. His thoughts flew to Valerie, and the road they took
was fouled with the mud of ugly deeds. A despair, grim at first, then
mocking, took possession of him. He loved Valerie to distraction. Loved
her for herself, apart from all worldly advantages that must accrue to
him from an alliance with her. His mother saw in that projected marriage
no more than the acquisition of the lands of La Vauvraye, and she may
even have thought that he himself saw no more. In that she was wrong;
but because of it she may have been justified of her impatience with him
at the tardiness, the very clumsiness with which he urged his suit. How
was she to know that it was just the sincerity of his passion made
him clumsy? For like many another, normally glib, self-assured, and
graceful, Marius grew halting, s