D’Aubremel sailed for the Indies to retrieve his fortune, and met death there by yellow fever.  So that the sad lessons of Felix’s family life stimulated to excess his innate leaning towards misanthropy—­if that name may define a resistless urgency of belief in the appearances of evil, linked with a doubt of the reality of good.  Probably, at heart, he believed himself incapable of a bad action, but he would take no oath to such a conviction, since by his theory every man must yield under certain circumstances, attacking powerfully his personal interest, while threatening slight danger of failure or detection.  This style of thought, set off by a fair share of witty expression and ever-ready impertinence, gave Felix a kind of ascendancy in his circle of intimates—­but naturally it gained him no friends.  Common reputation grows out of words rather than actions, and Felix suffered the just penalty of his sceptical fancies.  They cost him more than they were worth, as he had just learned by sad experience.

He had chanced to make the acquaintance of a rich manufacturer, Montmorot by name, whose daughter Ernestine was pleased with the devotion of a charming young fellow, who mingled the rather reckless grace of French cleverness with a reserved style and refined pride gained from the English blood of the Maldens.  For his part, Felix really loved the girl, and had let his impatience, that very day, carry him into a step that failed to move the elder Montmorot’s inflexibility.  He refused absolutely to give his daughter to a man without fortune or prospects.  Felix was crushed, his hopes all shattered at a blow, by this answer, though he had a thousand reasons to expect it.  And at what a moment!  A half-unfolded red ticket, stuffed with disgusting threats, peeped out from between the wall and his sofa.  The officers of justice had paid him a little visit.  He got into a passion with himself.

“Pshaw,” he cried, “confound all scruples!  If I had been less in love I should be Ernestine’s husband now.  With a pretty wife, one I am so fond of, too, I should have fortune, position, and the luxury indispensable to my life—­now, I don’t know where to lay my head to-morrow.  To-morrow, at ten o’clock, the sheriff will seize everything—­everything, from that Troyou sketch to that china monster, nodding his frightful sneering head at me.  They will carry off this casket that was my father’s—­this locket, with the hair of—­of—­what the deuce was her name?  Poor girl! how she loved me!  And now all that is left of her vanishes—­even her name!

“What, nothing? no hope?  Not even one of those silly impulses that used to drive me out into the streets when everybody else was abed, with the firm conviction that at some crossing, in some gutter, some unknown deity must have dropped a fat pocket-book, on purpose for me!  I believed in something, then—­even in lost pocket-books.  And now, now!  I would commit no such follies as that, but I believe I could be guilty of even worse things, if crime, common, low, contemptible, shameful crime, were not forbidden to the son of the Marquis d’Aubremel and Margaret Malden.