,
frightened at the magnitude of his debts--had commended his children to
Rovere's care.

If Carlotta had lived, without doubt Rovere would have made her his
wife. He loved her with a deep and respectful tenderness. The poor girl
died very suddenly, and there remained to Rovere only his dream. One of
those remembrances of a fireside, one of those spectres which brush the
forehead with their wings or the folds of their winding sheets, when in
the solitude in which he has voluntarily buried himself the searcher
after adventures recalls the past. The past of yesterday. Illusions,
disillusions, old loves, miseries!

Rovere gave to this brother of the dead girl the affection which he had
felt for her. He remembered, also, the father's request. Prades's son,
passionate, eager to live, tempted in all his appetites, accepted as his
due Rovere's truly paternal devotion, worked on the sympathy of this
man, who, through pity and duty, too, gave to Charles a little of the
affection which he had felt for the sister, almost his fiancee, and for
the father, dead by his own hand.

But, little by little, the solicitations, the unreasonable demands of
Prades, who, believing that he had a just claim on his father's old
partner, found it very natural that Rovere should devote himself to
him--these continual and pressing demands became for the Consul
irritating obsessions. Rovere seemed to this young man, who was a
spendthrift and a gambler--a gambler possessed with atavistic frenzy--a
sort of living savings bank, from which he could draw without counting.
His importunities at last seemed fatiguing and excessive, and Prades was
advised one beautiful day that he no longer need count from that moment
on the generosity of his benefactor. All this happened at Buenos Ayres,
and about the time of the Consul's departure for France. Rovere added to
this very curt declaration a last benefit. He gave to the brother of the
dead girl, to the son of Prades, of the firm of Rovere and Prades, a sum
sufficient to enable him to live while waiting for better things, and he
told the young man in proper terms that, as he had now no one to depend
upon, that he had better take himself elsewhere to be hung. The word
could not be, with the appetites and habits of Charles Prades, taken in
a figurative sense, and the young man continued his life of adventures,
as tragic in their reality and as improbable as the reporters'
melodramatic inventions.

Then, at the