He rose up from his chair, with habitual politeness, went through the customary bow with the customary grace, and then sank down again into his seat, unable to stand long upon his feet. I walked calmly and deliberately up to the side of the table, and without being invited, seated myself exactly before him. I must not stay to scrutinize my feelings at that moment. It is enough to say that they were sufficiently fiendish. There he sat, the murderer of my father, the persecutor of my race—a worm—a snake—which wanted but one crush of my heel, as it seemed to me, to lie a mass of rotting corruption before me. Pity! I could feel no pity at that moment. All human charities seemed extinguished within me, and although I would not have injured the frail body for the world, yet I felt if I could have got at his spirit I would have torn it to pieces. He looked at me in surprise and dismay, as in dull silence I drew a chair to the table and sat down, gazing fixedly at him, as if I would have looked into his very soul. He said not a word, and after a pause, I asked, “Do you know me, Marquis de Carcassonne?” “No,” he said, in the shrill treble of age, and with a look of fear and agitation, shrinking back in his chair as far as he could. “No. The dead do not come back here below—That is a superstition—No, I do not know you, though you are like—very like.” “I am Louis De Lacy,” I said, sternly. “Ah!” he cried “ah!” and he put out his hand as if to push me off from him. I could see him shiver and quake, and I went on repeating the same words: “I am Louis De Lacy, the son of him you murdered. He is before you in my person. He speaks to you by my voice. He demands that you do justice to his memory, even now, when you are trembling on the brink of that grave beyond which you will soon meet face to face. Answer me, Marquis de Carcassonne. Will you at length tell the truth? Will you do justice to the dead? Will you make the only atonement you can make to the murdered, before God puts his seal upon your obduracy, and you go to judgment for your crimes unconfessed and unrepented of?” The old man quivered in every limb and his face was as pale as death; but he answered not a word, and I went on with a hardness of heart for which I have hardly forgiven myself yet. “You were once wealthy,” I said, “and you are now poor. You were once the inhabitant of gilded halls, and soft, luxurious apartments: You are now in a miserable garret, wretched, and dark, and gloomy. Your crimes have led not to greater wealth and opulence; not to comfort and indulgence; not to the objects of ambition and desire; but to penury, distress, and want. There is a further step before you—a deep abyss, into which you seem inclined to plunge. The grave is a colder dwelling than this, the tribunal of an all-seeing God more terrible than any you can appeal to here, the hell which you have dug for yourself, more agonizing than even your conscience at this moment.”