“Oh, I am serious enough, God knows!” returned Vergniaud, with a heavy but impatient sigh, “I suppose there is, there must be, some terribly exact Mathematician concerned in the working of things, else a man’s past sins and failings being done with and over, would not turn up any more.  But they do turn up,—­the unseen Mathematician counts every figure;—­and of course trouble ensues.  My story is simply this;—­Some twenty-five years ago I was in Touraine;—­I was a priest as I am now—­Oh, yes!—­the sin is as black as the Church can make it!—­and one mid-summer evening I strolled into a certain quaint old church of a certain quaint old town,—­I need not name it--and saw there a girl, as sweet as an apple blossom, kneeling in front of the altar.  I watched her,—­I see her now!—­the late sunlight through the stained glass window fell like a glory on her pretty hair, and on the little white kerchief folded so daintily across her bosom, and on her small hands and the brown rosary that was twisted round her fingers.  She was praying, so she told me afterwards, to her guardian angel,—­I wonder what that personage was about just then, Bonpre!  Anyhow, to her petition came no answer but a devil,—­a devil personified in me,—­I made her love me,—­I tempted her by ever subtle and hellish persuasion I could think of,—­I can never even now think of that time without wondering where all the eloquent evil of my tongue came from—­and—­well!—­she never was able to ask the guardian angel any more favours!  And I?—­I think I loved her for a while,—­but no, I am not sure;—­I believe there is no such good thing as absolute love in my composition.  Anyway, I soon left Touraine, and had almost forgotten her when she wrote to tell me of the birth of her child—­a son.  I gave her no reply, and then she wrote again,—­such a letter!—­such words!  At the moment they burnt me,—­stabbed me—­positively hurt me,—­and I was not then easily hurt.  She swore she would bring the boy up to curse his father,—­ and, to put it quite briefly,—­she did.  She died when he was twenty, and it now appears the lad took an oath by her death-bed that he would never rest till he had killed the man who had dishonoured his mother, and broken her heart, and brought him into the world with a stigma on his name.  No filial respect, you see!” And Vergniaud tried to force a smile.  “To do the boy justice, he apparently means to keep his oath,—­he has not rested; he has been at infinite pains to discover me; he has even been at the trouble to write me a warning letter, and is now in Paris watching me.  I, in my turn, take care to protect myself;—­I am followed by detectives, and am at enormous pains to guard my life; not for my own sake but for his.  An odd complication of circumstances, is it not?  I cannot have him arrested because he would at once relate his history, and my name would be ruined.  And that would be quite as good a vengeance for him as the other thing.  You will admit that it is a very dramatic situation!”