“Your father was too honorable to ask me to marry him without the consent of the Count, and too proud to take me in his poverty.  So one day, after his stormy interview with my uncle, he came to me and said he was going away to endeavor to get fame, or wealth, to bestow upon me and make himself more worthy in the eyes of the Count de Rossillon.  Yet he wished to release me from any feeling of obligation to him, as, he said, I was too young and had too little acquaintance with life and society to know fully my own heart.  It would not be right, he thought, to bind me to himself by any promise.  I told him my affection for him would never change, but acquiesced in his arrangements with a sad and foreboding heart.  In a few weeks, he embarked for India.

“Then my uncle roused himself from the inertia of his quiet habits and made arrangements for a journey through France and Italy, which he said I was to take with him.

“I received the announcement with indifference, being wholly occupied with grief at the bitter separation from your father.  The change however proved salutary, and, in a week after our departure, I felt hope once more dawning in my heart.

“The country through which we travelled was sunny and beautiful, veined with sparkling streams, shadowed by forests, studded with the olive and mulberry, and with vines bearing the luscious grape for the vintage.  The constant change of scene and the daily renewal of objects of interest and novelty, combined with the elasticity of youth, brought back some degree of my former buoyancy and gayety.  My uncle was so evidently delighted with the return of my old cheerfulness, and exerted himself so much to heighten it in every way, that I knew he sincerely loved me, and was doing what he really thought would in the end contribute to my happiness.  He judged that my affection for your father was a transient, youthful dream, and would soon be forgotten; he fancied, no doubt, I was even then beginning to wake up from it.  He wished to prevent me from forming an early and what he considered an imprudent marriage, which I might one day regret, unavailingly.

“And it proved to be all right, my Adele.  Your father and I were both young, and the course the Count de Rossillon took with us, was a good though severe test of our affection.  In the meanwhile, I was secretly sustained by the hope that your father’s efforts would be crowned with success, and that, after a few years, he would return and my uncle, having found, that nothing could draw me from my attachment to him, would out of his own love for me and consideration for my happiness, at last consent to our union.

“We crossed the Alps and went into Italy.  Here a new world was opened to me,—­a world of beauty and art.  It bestowed upon me many hours of exquisite enjoyment.  The Count travelled with his own carriage and servants, and we lingered wherever I felt a desire to prolong my observations.  He purchased a collection of pictures, statues, and other gems and curiosities of art.  Among the rest, the Madonna there, my Adele, which he presented to me, because I so much liked it.  But I must not linger now.  On our return to France, we spent a month at Paris, and there, though too young to be introduced into society, I met in private many distinguished and fashionable people, who were friends of the Count.