ordinary, that what you tell me
seems less astonishing than it otherwise might."

"Mercedes was at first in the deepest despair at the blow which deprived
her of Edmond. I have told you of her attempts to propitiate M. de
Villefort, her devotion to the elder Dantes. In the midst of her
despair, a new affliction overtook her. This was the departure of
Fernand--of Fernand, whose crime she did not know, and whom she regarded
as her brother. Fernand went, and Mercedes remained alone. Three months
passed and still she wept--no news of Edmond, no news of Fernand, no
companionship save that of an old man who was dying with despair. One
evening, after a day of accustomed vigil at the angle of two roads
leading to Marseilles from the Catalans, she returned to her home
more depressed than ever. Suddenly she heard a step she knew, turned
anxiously around, the door opened, and Fernand, dressed in the uniform
of a sub-lieutenant, stood before her. It was not the one she wished for
most, but it seemed as if a part of her past life had returned to her.
Mercedes seized Fernand's hands with a transport which he took for love,
but which was only joy at being no longer alone in the world, and seeing
at last a friend, after long hours of solitary sorrow. And then, it must
be confessed, Fernand had never been hated--he was only not precisely
loved. Another possessed all Mercedes' heart; that other was absent, had
disappeared, perhaps was dead. At this last thought Mercedes burst into
a flood of tears, and wrung her hands in agony; but the thought, which
she had always repelled before when it was suggested to her by another,
came now in full force upon her mind; and then, too, old Dantes
incessantly said to her, 'Our Edmond is dead; if he were not, he would
return to us.' The old man died, as I have told you; had he lived,
Mercedes, perchance, had not become the wife of another, for he would
have been there to reproach her infidelity. Fernand saw this, and when
he learned of the old man's death he returned. He was now a lieutenant.
At his first coming he had not said a word of love to Mercedes; at the
second he reminded her that he loved her. Mercedes begged for six months
more in which to await and mourn for Edmond."

"So that," said the abbe, with a bitter smile, "that makes eighteen
months in all. What more could the most devoted lover desire?" Then he
murmured the words of the English poet, "'Frailty, thy name is woman.'"

"Six months