amber was a man, who, with arms crossed upon his bosom and
eyes fastened in profound and seemingly mournful contemplation upon the
floor, slowly paced from one extremity of the spacious apartment to the
other.

This man was M. Dantes, representative of Marseilles in the French
Chamber of Deputies.

"At last, at last," he murmured, "the avenging Nemesis ceases to gnaw!
At length the angel Peace begins to smile! The tempest, which, for
nearly thirty years, has raved and swelled in my heart, begins to lull!
At length I commence to live--at length I realize and pursue life's true
end. Let me reflect," he continued, after a pause, "let me review the
past. The past! alas! my past is a painful blank! At twenty, from the
very marriage-feast, from the side of her whom more than life I loved, I
was torn by the envy of one man and the jealousy of another, and then,
by the ambition of a third, to whom nothing was crime if it but
ministered to that unhallowed impulse, I was plunged into a dungeon,
whose counterpart only the vaults of hell can furnish. For fourteen long
years I was the tenant of a sombre tomb. The agony, the despair of
those awful years--oh! God! oh! God!" and he shuddered and clasped his
hands over his head as if to crush the recollection.

After a pause he resumed: "And then those daily vows of vengeance! oh!
vain and impotent vows as then they seemed! vows of awful agony, of
fiendish retribution, though at that time I knew not all! I knew not
that a venerable father had pined and died of starvation through the
wrong done to me! I knew not that the woman I loved had become the bride
of my destroyer! Yet those vows, awful and blasphemous as they were,
those vows of vengeance have been terribly, dreadfully fulfilled! As the
destroying angel of God's retributive providence, I was endowed with
superhuman powers to walk the earth, to administer His justice and to
execute His decrees. For fourteen years was that vengeance prepared, yet
delayed. At last, it fell--it fell. All who had wronged me met their
dreadful doom. Ambition was changed to madness. Avarice was tortured
with bankruptcy. Falsehood sought refuge in self destruction; and
all--all--all--even the meanest of those who had contributed to blight
my life--perished miserably at my will! And did the guilty suffer alone?
Alas! impious, remorseless, horrible revenge! The innocent and the
criminal suffered alike. A might approaching omnipotence was vouchsafed
me,