There is still another age, however; an age the most perilous, often the most full of pains; an age when the eager aspirations of youth reach out the hand towards fruition; when the great truths of disappointment break upon us; when we first learn the bitter lesson that hope has told us idle tales, that fortune is of fickle favour, that friendships are too often false, that our own hearts do ourselves wrong, that enjoyment itself is often a vanity and often a vision, that we must suffer, and grieve, and repent in the midst of a world which, shortly before, we fancied was composed of nothing but brightness, and beauty, and happiness. I speak of the time of life when we first put on manhood, and meet all its sorrows at the moment when we expect nothing but its joys. For that period, too, there is a bright compensation given, there is a sustaining principle implanted in our breast, common to the highest and the lowest, the savage and the civilized; a principle that furnishes a balm for many wounds, that surrounds us with an atmosphere of consolation, hope, and joy, and enables us to live on in one splendid dream, even in the midst of hard and dark realities. That principle is love; and that principle was warm and strong in the bosom of Bernard de Rohan, as, on the day after that in which the conversations we have mentioned in our last chapter took place, he stood, a few minutes before the setting of the sun, under a group of tall fir-trees that had pitched themselves upon a pinnacle of the rock, about ten yards distant from the farther angle of the garden attached to the chateau of Masseran. The trees grew very close together; and, what between scanty soil and the mountain winds, their large trunks had contorted themselves into manifold strange shapes. From this group two or three rows of the same kind of firs ran down the side of the hill into the valley. One would have supposed that they were the remains of some old avenue had the lines been but a little more regular.