I made the engagement. No, do not seek any longer to
discover the reason. I really am quite ashamed to have been the cause of
your undergoing such severe self-examination; let us drop the subject,
and adopt the middle course of delay, which implies neither a rupture
nor an engagement. Ma foi, there is no hurry. My daughter is only
seventeen years old, and your son twenty-one. While we wait, time will
be progressing, events will succeed each other; things which in the
evening look dark and obscure, appear but too clearly in the light of
morning, and sometimes the utterance of one word, or the lapse of a
single day, will reveal the most cruel calumnies."

"Calumnies, did you say, sir?" cried Morcerf, turning livid with rage.
"Does any one dare to slander me?"

"Monsieur, I told you that I considered it best to avoid all
explanation."

"Then, sir, I am patiently to submit to your refusal?"

"Yes, sir, although I assure you the refusal is as painful for me to
give as it is for you to receive, for I had reckoned on the honor
of your alliance, and the breaking off of a marriage contract always
injures the lady more than the gentleman."

"Enough, sir," said Morcerf, "we will speak no more on the subject." And
clutching his gloves in anger, he left the apartment. Danglars observed
that during the whole conversation Morcerf had never once dared to
ask if it was on his own account that Danglars recalled his word.
That evening he had a long conference with several friends; and M.
Cavalcanti, who had remained in the drawing-room with the ladies, was
the last to leave the banker's house.

The next morning, as soon as he awoke, Danglars asked for the
newspapers; they were brought to him; he laid aside three or four, and
at last fixed on the Impartial, the paper of which Beauchamp was the
chief editor. He hastily tore off the cover, opened the journal with
nervous precipitation, passed contemptuously over the Paris jottings,
and arriving at the miscellaneous intelligence, stopped with a malicious
smile, at a paragraph headed "We hear from Yanina." "Very good,"
observed Danglars, after having read the paragraph; "here is a little
article on Colonel Fernand, which, if I am not mistaken, would render
the explanation which the Comte de Morcerf required of me perfectly
unnecessary."

At the same moment, that is, at nine o'clock in the morning, Albert de
Morcerf, dressed in a black coat buttoned up to his chin, might have
been seen