“Did you expect to? It takes some time to go round the world,” replied the poet with his pompous irony. “But think,” said La Briere, “of this enormous fortune.” “Ah, my friend, is it not well invested in you?” cried Canalis, accompanying the words with a charming gesture. “Melchior,” said La Briere, “I am yours for life and death.” He wrung the poet’s hand and left him abruptly, for he was in haste to meet Monsieur Mignon. CHAPTER XV. A FATHER STEPS IN The Comte de La Bastie was at this moment overwhelmed with the sorrows which lay in wait for him as their prey. He had learned from his daughter’s letter of Bettina’s death and of his wife’s infirmity, and Dumay related to him, when they met, his terrible perplexity as to Modeste’s love affairs. “Leave me to myself,” he said to his faithful friend. As the lieutenant closed the door, the unhappy father threw himself on a sofa, with his head in his hands, weeping those slow, scanty tears which suffuse the eyes of a man of sixty, but do not fall,--tears soon dried, yet quick to start again,--the last dews of the human autumn. “To have children, to have a wife, to adore them--what is it but to have many hearts and bare them to a dagger?” he cried, springing up with the bound of a tiger and walking up and down the room. “To be a father is to give one’s self over, bound hand and foot to sorrow. If I meet that D’Estourny I will kill him. To have daughters!--one gives her life to a scoundrel, the other, my Modeste, falls a victim to whom? a coward, who deceives her with the gilded paper of a poet. If it were Canalis himself it might not be so bad; but that Scapin of a lover!--I will strangle him with my two hands,” he cried, making an involuntary gesture of furious determination. “And what then? suppose my Modeste were to die of grief?” He gazed mechanically out of the windows of the hotel des Princes, and then returned to the sofa, where he sat motionless. The fatigues of six voyages to India, the anxieties of speculation, the dangers he had encountered and evaded, and his many griefs, had silvered Charles Mignon’s head. His handsome soldierly face, so pure in outline and now bronzed by the suns of China and the southern seas, had acquired an air of dignity which his present grief rendered almost sublime. “Mongenod told me he felt confidence in the young man who is coming to ask me for my daughter,” he thought at last; and at this moment Ernest de La Briere was announced by one of the servants whom Monsieur de La Bastie had attached to himself during the last four years. “You have come, monsieur, from my friend Mongenod?” he said.