you have in me, Anto," he said, "you possess the weapons of
Achilles."

Antonino thought he was mocking at him and frowned.

"You think I am sneering? Or merely laughing at you? Alas, it is a long
while since I indulged in laughter. It was this woman, with whom you
have fallen in love, who froze the laugh forever on my lips! she would
have been the death of me if I had not overruled her and exterminated
her within my breast. How I loved her! how I have suffered through
her--enough to be our united portions of future pain--suffer you no
more, therefore. You are too young, tender and credulous to try a fall
with that creature. She must have divined long ago that you were
enamored of her. She is not too clear-sighted in all things, but she
sees such effects by intuition. It is very probable that she has
returned to this house on your account, so suddenly. I could guess that
she was on the eve of flight, but not that she would return. She always
needs fresh sensations to make herself believe that she is alive, for
she is more lifeless than those whom she robbed of life."

Antonino did not understand the allusion, for he had never felt less
like dying than since Cesarine had been seen again.

"I mean that she sends the chill of death into the soul, heart and brain
of man, and it congeals the marrow in his bones!" said Clemenceau,
energetically. "You may say that if she is a wicked woman and if,
whatever her defense, her absence covers some evil step, I ought to
separate from her. It is all the present state of the law allows. But
while her absence would have prevented you, or another friend, from
meeting her, still she would have borne my name. That name I am doubly
bound to make honorable, for it was stained with blood--that of one of
her ever-accursed race. My father won an illustrious name and, her
ancestress, whom he married, was dragging it publically in the mud amid
all the scandals of society, when he slew her on her couch of gilded
infamy. Ashamed of this name--not because he was indicated under it, but
because she had so vilified it--his greatest desire to the friends who
visited him in the condemned cell, was to have me, his son, change it.
They had me brought up at a distance under the name of Claudius
Ruprecht. It might even have happened that another country than that of
my birth would receive the glory which a heaven-sent idea is to bestow
upon France. Now, I am more than ever determined that her venom shall