"No voice in joy shall ever fill that place where she has wept so many silent tears--there, where she loved me still, our spirits have met again. Minnie, forgive me!" And the man knelt in that desolate abode, and prayed fervently. "If," he said, "I should ever be tempted to forget her sorrow, I will return hither, and fill my heart with memory, and hatred of myself!" And in this mood he returned to Paris: and a week had elapsed since the ball. It will not seem strange if, on his arrival, he shut himself up in his studio, away from the world, for days. How commune with that?--or those who had known her, and now smiled over her grave? Every moment his feelings became more vindictive towards Lady Dora: it was the only passion surviving in his heart--all the others were wrecked, and had gone down with the "Hirondelle." Perhaps it was well that Marmaduke Burton had gone, no one knew whither, or a worse one than vindictiveness might have revived. Assuredly he might have been driven to murder, had he once given way to his prompting fiend. It will seem almost strange to many, perhaps, that with this anguish raging in his heart, he never once thought even of suicide. Tremenhere was a brave man--an essentially courageous one; he feared nothing in this world. But he had a strong religious sense, implanted by his mother: he feared the suicide's unfailing hell, when madness comes not to plead for the act before Heaven. He was preparing himself, in the solitude of his chamber, for a pilgrimage of suffering and repentance, before he should meet her spirit, doomed in its other state to throw off the garb of mercy and forgiveness _she_ would ever have worn, and before Heaven accuse, perhaps condemn, him. He was preparing to face the world, and veil his suffering--to toil on; and then he asked himself, "For what?" Here his mother arose before him. "Yes," he said, "I have deserted, forgotten, reviled her; it shall be my task to place her high in brightness and purity. And if, in my passage, one lip breathes Minnie's name in shadow before me, then will I bare all my own heavy sorrow, and, condemning myself, clear her! Now, it would but sully a fame like hers, to drag her forth uncalled for. I must watch my opportunity; and the day I debase _her_ enemies--her enemy, her heartless cousin--I will elevate her where none shall dare attaint her again!"