re tender name. My father, your father, Mellefont----

MELLEFONT.

Very well, Sara, our kind, our dear father! I was very young when I
last used this sweet name; very young, when I had to unlearn the
equally sweet name of mother.

SARA.

You had to unlearn it, and I--I was never so happy, as to be able to
pronounce it at all. My life was her death! O God, I was a guiltless
matricide! And how much was wanting--how little, how almost nothing was
wanting to my becoming a parricide too! Not a guiltless, but a
voluntary parricide. And who knows, whether I am not so already? The
years, the days, the moments by which he is nearer to his end than he
would have been without the grief I have caused him--of those I have
robbed him. However old and weary he may be when Fate shall permit him
to depart, my conscience will yet be unable to escape the reproach that
but for me he might have lived yet longer. A sad reproach with which I
doubtless should not need to charge myself, if a loving mother had
guided me in my youth. Through her teaching and her example my heart
would--you look tenderly on me, Mellefont? You are right; a mother
would perhaps have been a tyrant for very love, and I should not now
belong to Mellefont. Why do I wish then for that, which a wiser Fate
denied me out of kindness? Its dispensations are always best. Let us
only make proper use of that which it gives us; a father who never yet
let me sigh for a mother; a father who will also teach you to forget
the parents you lost so soon. What a flattering thought. I fall in love
with it, and forget almost, that in my innermost heart there is still
something which refuses to put faith in it. What is this rebellious
something?

MELLEFONT.

This something, dearest Sara, as you have already said yourself, is the
natural, timid incapability to realize a great happiness. Ah, your
heart hesitated less to believe itself unhappy than now, to its own
torment, it hesitates to believe in its own happiness! But as to one
who has become dizzy with quick movement, the external objects still
appear to move round when again he is sitting still, so the heart which
has been violently agitated cannot suddenly become calm again; there
remains often for a long time, a quivering palpitation which we must
suffer to exhaust itself.

SARA.

I believe it, Melle