red, as the body does after extreme fatigue.
"What?" said he to himself, while the lamp and the wax lights were
nearly burnt out, and the servants were waiting impatiently in the
anteroom; "what? this edifice which I have been so long preparing, which
I have reared with so much care and toil, is to be crushed by a single
touch, a word, a breath! Yes, this self, of whom I thought so much, of
whom I was so proud, who had appeared so worthless in the dungeons of
the Chateau d'If, and whom I had succeeded in making so great, will be
but a lump of clay to-morrow. Alas, it is not the death of the body I
regret; for is not the destruction of the vital principle, the repose to
which everything is tending, to which every unhappy being aspires,--is
not this the repose of matter after which I so long sighed, and which
I was seeking to attain by the painful process of starvation when Faria
appeared in my dungeon? What is death for me? One step farther into
rest,--two, perhaps, into silence.

"No, it is not existence, then, that I regret, but the ruin of projects
so slowly carried out, so laboriously framed. Providence is now opposed
to them, when I most thought it would be propitious. It is not God's
will that they should be accomplished. This burden, almost as heavy as a
world, which I had raised, and I had thought to bear to the end, was too
great for my strength, and I was compelled to lay it down in the middle
of my career. Oh, shall I then, again become a fatalist, whom fourteen
years of despair and ten of hope had rendered a believer in providence?
And all this--all this, because my heart, which I thought dead, was only
sleeping; because it has awakened and has begun to beat again, because
I have yielded to the pain of the emotion excited in my breast by a
woman's voice. Yet," continued the count, becoming each moment more
absorbed in the anticipation of the dreadful sacrifice for the morrow,
which Mercedes had accepted, "yet, it is impossible that so noble-minded
a woman should thus through selfishness consent to my death when I am in
the prime of life and strength; it is impossible that she can carry to
such a point maternal love, or rather delirium. There are virtues which
become crimes by exaggeration. No, she must have conceived some pathetic
scene; she will come and throw herself between us; and what would be
sublime here will there appear ridiculous." The blush of pride mounted
to the count's forehead as this thought pa