of failure in the face of the world and that society he had so lately entered and meant to rule, of leaving the chariot of the countess and becoming once more a muddied pedestrian, was more than he could bear.  Madness began to dance and whirl and shake her bells at the gates of the fantastic palace in which the poet had been dreaming.  In this extremity, Nathan waited for some lucky accident, determined not to kill himself until the final moment.

During the last days employed by the legal formalities required before proceeding to arrest for debt, Raoul went about, in spite of himself, with that coldly sullen and morose expression of face which may be noticed in persons who are either fated to commit suicide or are meditating it.  The funereal ideas they are turning over in their minds appear upon their foreheads in gray and cloudy tints, their smile has something fatalistic in it, their motions are solemn.  These unhappy beings seem to want to suck the last juices of the life they mean to leave; their eyes see things invisible, their ears are listening to a death-knell, they pay no attention to the minor things about them.  These alarming symptoms Marie perceived one evening at Lady Dudley’s.  Raoul was sitting apart on a sofa in the boudoir, while the rest of the company were conversing in the salon.  The countess went to the door, but he did not raise his head; he heard neither Marie’s breathing nor the rustle of her silk dress; he was gazing at a flower in the carpet, with fixed eyes, stupid with grief; he felt he had rather die than abdicate.  All the world can’t have the rock of Saint Helena for a pedestal.  Moreover, suicide was then the fashion in Paris.  Is it not, in fact, the last resource of all atheistical societies?  Raoul, as he sat there, had decided that the moment had come to die.  Despair is in proportion to our hopes; that of Raoul had no other issue than the grave.

“What is the matter?” cried Marie, flying to him.

“Nothing,” he answered.

There is one way of saying that word “nothing” between lovers which signifies its exact contrary.  Marie shrugged her shoulders.

“You are a child,” she said.  “Some misfortune has happened to you.”

“No, not to me,” he replied.  “But you will know all soon enough, Marie,” he added, affectionately.

“What were you thinking of when I came in?” she asked, in a tone of authority.

“Do you want to know the truth?” She nodded.  “I was thinking of you; I was saying to myself that most men in my place would have wanted to be loved without reserve.  I am loved, am I not?”

“Yes,” she answered.

“And yet,” he said, taking her round the waist and kissing her forehead at the risk of being seen, “I leave you pure and without remorse.  I could have dragged you into an abyss, but you remain in all your glory on its brink without a stain.  Yet one thought troubles me—­”

“What is it?” she asked.