Twelve o’clock, therefore, found her dressed in her deepest mourning, and seated in her private drawing-room, awaiting the advent of her most dreaded visitor, Waldemar de Volaski.

CHAPTER XXXVII.

A SENTENCE OF BANISHMENT.

Valerie, in an agony of terror, waited for her expected visitor.

Did she love him, then?

Ah, no!  Horror at the position in which she found herself so filled her soul as to leave no room for any softer emotion.  She loved no one in the world, not even herself; she wished for nothing on earth but death, and only her religious faith, or her superstitious fears, restrained her from laying sacrilegious hands upon her own life.

While watching for her dreaded guest she bitterly communed with herself.

“No one ever really loved me,” she moaned.  “Every one connected with me loved only himself, or herself, and sacrificed me.  My father and my mother cared only for themselves and their own ambitions, and so they immolated me, their only child, to their gratification; my suitors loved only themselves and their passions, and immolated me!  And I—­I love no one and hate myself! hate the creature they have all combined to make me!  If it were not for that which comes after death I would not exist an hour longer—­I would die!”

As she muttered this the little ormolu clock on the mantlepiece struck twelve.

“The hour has come.  He will be here in another moment!  Oh, why could he not leave me in peace?  Oh, what shall I do?” she exclaimed, in her excitement rising from her seat and beginning to pace up and down the room with wild, disordered steps.

Sometimes she stopped to listen, but without hearing any sound that might herald the approach of a visitor; then resumed her wild and purposeless walk, until the clock struck the quarter, when she suddenly threw herself down in the chair, muttering: 

“Fifteen minutes late!  I do not want to see him!  But since he is to come, I wish he had come, and this was all over.”

Another quarter of an hour passed, and her visitor had not arrived.

Again in her anxiety she arose and began to walk the floor and to look out occasionally at a window which commanded the approach to the house.

No one, however, was in sight.

She sat down again, muttering: 

“This seems an intentional affront, an insult.  He treats me with no consideration.  Well, perhaps I deserve none.  Oh!  I wish I knew to whom my duty is due!  I wish I had some one of whom I dared to ask counsel!  I certainly did wed Waldemar.  I certainly did believe him to be my lawful husband, and then my duty was clearly due to him.  But my parents came and tore me away from him, and told me that my marriage was not lawful, and that Waldemar de Volaski was not my husband.  Then they took me to Paris, and told me that I must forget the