ated his features. His eyes had lighted on the portrait of
his wife, the mother of Florestan de Saint-Remy! He folded his arms
across his breast, bowed his head, as if to escape this sight, and
strode rapidly up and down the room.

"This is strange!" he said. "That woman is dead--I killed her lover--and
yet my wound is as deep, as sensitive, as the first day I received it;
my thirst of vengeance is not yet quenched; my savage misanthropy, which
has all but entirely isolated me from the world, has left me alone, and
in constant contemplation of the thought of my injury. Yes; for the
death of the accomplice of this infamy has avenged the outrage, but not
effaced its memory from my remembrance. Oh, yes! I feel that what
renders my hatred inextinguishable is the thought that, for fifteen
years, I was a dupe; that for fifteen years I treated with respect and
esteem a wretched woman who had infamously betrayed me; that I have
loved her son--the son of crime--as if he had indeed been my own child;
for the aversion with which Florestan now inspires me proves but too
clearly that he is the offspring of adultery! And yet I have not the
absolute conviction of his illegitimacy: it is just possible that he is
still my child! And sometimes that thought is agony to me! If he were
indeed my son! Then my abandonment of him, the coldness I have always
testified towards him, my constant refusals to see him, are
unpardonable. But, after all, he is rich, young, happy; and of what use
should I be to him? Yes; but then, perchance, his tenderness might have
soothed the bitter anguish which his mother has caused me!"

After a moment of deep reflection the comte shrugged his shoulders and
continued:

"Still these foolish suppositions, weak as useless, which revive all my
suffering! Let me be a man, and overcome the absurd and painful emotion
which I experience when I think that I am again about to see him whom,
for ten years, I have loved with the most mad idolatry,--whom I have
loved as my son; he--he--the son of the man whose blood I saw flow with
such intense joy! And they would not let me be present at his last
agony,--at his death! Ah, they know not what it was to have been
stricken as deeply as I was! Then, too, to think that my name--always
honoured and respected--should have been so often mentioned with scoff
and derision, as is always mentioned that of a wronged husband! To think
that my name--a name of which I had always been so prou