"You guessed it from the first, and yet dared come here--alone--at midnight--with me! No, you have not guessed it. Your girl's heart never framed the outline of such a sin, you will swoon but to hear its name!" The night wind howling through the shivering trees, the restless brook moaning down the hollow, if ever their wild lament had ceased, would have heard, brokenly and incoherently, such a story as this: In a quaint, secluded village, in some remote province of France, Victor Viennet's early childhood had been passed. It was a childhood so companionless that, but that he was happy and needed nothing save his sad mother's love and his wild freedom, one would have pitied him even then, before he knew the shame he had to bear and the sufferings it would bring. For months together no stranger's foot would cross the threshold of the lonely cottage; the neighbors looked askance at the two pale women and the pretty boy, who had come so strangely and so stealthily into their midst, and rumor had been busy even there. The village children were forbid to play with "le petit Anglais;" they taunted and mocked him, and he, in his turn, spurned and hated them, and clung more entirely to his mother, who strove to interfere between him and every insult, every harshness, and vexation. And but too well she succeeded in guarding him; when death came to unloose her arms from around him, he was left too sensitive and shrinking a plant to bear the first breath of the scorching simoon of scorn and ignominy that had been gathering up its strength so long. The fatal secret of his birth, that explained all, burst suddenly upon him while his childish heart was yet bleeding with his first grief. He learned that he must thank his dead mother for the brand of shame that he must bear through life; that for her, whom he had worshipped as an angel, there was on every lip a name of scorn. He learned that every man's hand was against him, as an outcast and a bastard; and all the strength of his nature became a strength of hatred; his southern blood turned to gall in his young veins. The home that had been his sanctuary, his city of refuge, was a desecrated and hateful place. The same fever that had struck down his mother, had laid her nurse and companion low. Tenderness and compassion had been blasted in the boy's heart; they had both deceived and wronged him; he owed nothing to the memory of the one, nor to the misery of the other; and without a look, he left her in her unconsciousness, and turned his back forever on his home, with the curse in his heart for which he had not yet learned the words.