y interrupting herself, Louise exclaimed with alarm:

"Sir, sir, look at my father! what can be the matter with him?"

Morel had heard the latter part of this narration with a dull
indifference, which Rodolph had accounted for by attributing it to the
heavy additional misfortune which had occurred to him. After such
violent and repeated shocks, his tears must have dried up, his
sensibility have become lost; he had not even the strength left to feel
anger, as Rodolph thought; but Rodolph was mistaken. As the flame of a
candle which is nearly extinguished dies away and recovers, so Morel's
reason, already much shaken, wavered for some time, throwing out now and
then some small rays of intelligence, and then suddenly all was
darkness.

Absolutely unconscious of what was said or passing around him, for some
time the lapidary had become quite insane. Although his hand-wheel was
placed on the other side of his working-table, and he had not in his
hands either stones or tools, yet the occupied artisan was feigning the
operations of his daily labour, and affecting to use his implements. He
accompanied this pantomime with a sort of noise with his tongue against
the roof of his mouth, in imitation of the noise of his lathe in its
rotatory motions.

"But, sir," said Louise again, with increasing fright, "look, pray look
at my father!"

Then, approaching the artisan, she said to him:

"Father! father!"

Morel gazed on his daughter with that troubled, vague, distracted,
wandering look which characterises the insane, and without discontinuing
his assumed labour, he replied, in a low and melancholy tone:

"I owe the notary thirteen hundred francs; it is the price of Louise's
blood,--so I must work, work, work!--oh, I'll pay, I'll pay, I'll pay!"

"Can it be possible? This cannot be,--he is not mad,--no, no!" exclaimed
Louise, in a heart-rending voice. "He will recover,--it is but a
momentary fit of absence!"

"Morel, my good fellow," said Rodolph to him, "we are here. Your
daughter is near you,--she is innocent."

"Thirteen hundred francs!" said the lapidary, not attending to Rodolph,
but going on with his sham employment.

"My father!" exclaimed Louise, throwing herself at his feet, and
clasping his hands in her own, in spite of his resistance, "it is I--it
is your Louise!"

"Thirteen hundred francs," he repeated, wresting his hands from the
grasp of his daughter. "Thirteen hundred francs,--and if not," he added,
in