mour. And Kersain was enrolled in the ranks of
those who accounted Andre-Louis a man without heart or conscience.

But in his "Confessions" he tells us--and this is one of the glimpses
that reveal the true man under all that make-believe--that on that night
he went down on his knees to commune with his dead friend Philippe, and
to call his spirit to witness that he was about to take the last step
in the fulfilment of the oath sworn upon his body at Gavrillac two years
ago.

CHAPTER IX. TORN PRIDE

M. de La Tour d'Azyr's engagement in the country on that Sunday was with
M. de Kercadiou. To fulfil it he drove out early in the day to Meudon,
taking with him in his pocket a copy of the last issue of "Les Actes des
Apotres," a journal whose merry sallies at the expense of the innovators
greatly diverted the Seigneur de Gavrillac. The venomous scorn it
poured upon those worthless rapscallions afforded him a certain solatium
against the discomforts of expatriation by which he was afflicted as a
result of their detestable energies.

Twice in the last month, had M. de La Tour d'Azyr gone to visit the Lord
of Gavrillac at Meudon, and the sight of Aline, so sweet and fresh,
so bright and of so lively a mind, had caused those embers smouldering
under the ashes of the past, embers which until now he had believed
utterly extinct, to kindle into flame once more. He desired her as we
desire Heaven. I believe that it was the purest passion of his life;
that had it come to him earlier he might have been a vastly different
man. The cruelest wound that in all his selfish life he had taken was
when she sent him word, quite definitely after the affair at the Feydau,
that she could not again in any circumstances receive him. At one
blow--through that disgraceful riot--he had been robbed of a mistress he
prized and of a wife who had become a necessity to the very soul of him.
The sordid love of La Binet might have consoled him for the compulsory
renunciation of his exalted love of Aline, just as to his exalted love
of Aline he had been ready to sacrifice his attachment to La Binet. But
that ill-timed riot had robbed him at once of both. Faithful to his word
to Sautron he had definitely broken with La Binet, only to find that
Aline had definitely broken with him. And by the time that he had
sufficiently recovered from his grief to think again of La Binet, the
comedienne had vanished beyond discovery.

For all this he blamed, and mo