For several days and nights he had scarcely any intervals of peace from these soul-penetrating fancies, and these moments were due to visits.  But who came to visit?  Not the writer to the signet, the brother of his affianced, whom he had expected to see first of all as a friend, if not as a relation, ready to extend the hand that would save him; not any of those with whom he had shared the folly of extravagance, if not dissipation, on whom he had lavished favours in the wildness of his generosity.  The first was felicitating himself on his sister’s escape; the latter received the lesson that teaches prudence a la distance.  His only visitors were one or two heads of families where he had been received as a fashionable friend, and these came only to look and inquire.  Their curiosity was satisfied when they got out of him the amount of his debt, and pleased when they considered that their daughters were at home, and under no chance of becoming allied to a prisoner.  One or two old associates, too, paid their respects to him, but they were of those who had resisted his fascinations and found their pleasures in their studies.  We seek for the virtues, but we do not always find them in the high places, where masks, copied from them and bearing their beautiful lineaments and their effulgence, are worn in their stead only to cover the vices which are their very antipodes.  No:  more often in lowlier regions, lying perdu behind vices, not voluntary, but often, as it were, inflicted and peering out, ashamed to be seen, because arrayed in the rags of poverty.  A solitary female stole in to him.  Who was she?  One with whom he had formed a connection of not an honourable kind, only now interrupted by the walls of the prison?  No.  One whom he had long before cast off, only because the vice he had inoculated her with had cast off the beauty that had inflamed him.  Nor did he know the meaning of that stealthy visit, which lasted only for a few minutes—­so unexpected, for he had not seen her during many months, so singular, so unnatural, so unlike the world, returning gratitude for injury, benediction for infamy, until, after she had suddenly slipped away, he found by the side of the wall a small bottle of wine.  That form and face, once more beautiful in his estimation than were those even now of his honourable affianced, entered among the imagery of his reveries; but the diamond eyes never displaced those of her gentle nature.  He had wronged her, but they never filled with the fire of denunciation.  She had looked her grief at him only through the tears he had raised in them, and had never attempted to dry.  Yes, the diamond eyes entered everywhere, and into every form but that one where the red heat of revenge might have been expected to shrivel up and harden the issues of tears.

Further on in the same evening, the jailer, a good-natured sort of fellow, came in to him while he was absorbed in these thoughts.  He was at the time sitting on his bed.