ter a minute's pause she resumed: "But
why should I dwell on such vain and fruitless regrets? Thanks to you, my
lord, charity will replace the void left in my heart by disappointed
affection. Already have I owed to your counsels the enjoyment of the
most touching emotions. Your words, my lord, affect me deeply, and
exercise unbounded influence over me. The more I meditate on what you
have advanced, the more I search into its real depth and value, the more
I am struck by its vast power and truth, the more just and valuable does
it appear to me. Then, when I reflect that, not satisfied with
sympathising with sufferings of which you can form no idea from actual
experience, you aid me with the most salutary counsels, and guide me,
step by step, in the new and delightful path of virtue and goodness
pointed out by you to relieve a weary and worn-out heart, oh, my lord,
what treasure of all that is good must your mind contain! From what
source have you drawn so large a supply of tender pity for the woes of
all?"

"Nay, the secret of my sincere commiseration with the woes of others
consists in my having deeply suffered myself,--nay, in still sighing
over heavy sorrows none can alleviate or cure."

"You, my lord! Surely you cannot have tasted thus bitterly of grief and
misfortune?"

"Yes, 'tis even so. I sometimes think that I have been made to taste of
nearly every bitter which fills our cup of worldly sorrows, the better
to fit me for sympathising with all descriptions of worldly trials.
Wounded and sorely afflicted as a friend, a husband, and a parent, what
grief can there be in which I am not qualified to participate?"

"I always understood, my lord, that your late wife, the grand duchess,
left no child?"

"True; but, before I became her husband, I was the father of a daughter,
who died quite young. And, however you may smile at the idea, I can with
truth assert that the loss of that child has poisoned all my subsequent
days. And this grief increases with my years. Each succeeding hour but
redoubles the poignancy of my regrets, which, far from abating, appear
to grow,--strengthen, even as my daughter would have done had she been
spared me. She would now have been in her seventeenth year."

"And her mother," asked Clemence, after a trifling hesitation, "is she
still living?"

"Oh, name her not, I beseech you!" exclaimed Rodolph, whose features
became suddenly overcast at this reference to Sarah. "She to whom you
allu