“Ah, Heaven, if only I might have taken her at her word,” he sighed to himself, “I would have taught that young heart to love, and that soft cheek to blush at my glance. I would have won her heart as well as her hand. Aline, my poor darling, where are you to-night?” He put away the thought of her with a great effort of will and returned with a shudder to the subject of his story. “I was young and impressible, Mr. Rodney. My heart was touched by the beauty of the picture I had seen, and Monsieur Sanson’s refusals to present me to the original only fanned my boyish passion into hotter flame. I importuned him often, but he only laughed at me, artfully leading me on by his apparent reluctance to yield to my desires. Ah, what a simple, gullible young fool I was in those days.” He paused and drew his breath with a heavy tortured sigh. Mr. Rodney held a reviving cordial to his lips. His heart was pierced with remorse as he looked at the pale face and heard the weak voice, and realized what a wreck he had made of the strong man. “It would be much better if you waited until you are stronger before you finish,” he said, compassionately, though his anxiety to hear the rest was very strong. “No, I cannot wait. Let me tell my story and clear Aline’s name, then if I die, what matter? I have long been weary of life,” sighed Oran Delaney. There came to him across the mist of the long intervening months a memory of the words he had read to Aline when she lay wounded and impatient in the beautiful blue room--the words she had rejected in the blindness of her ignorant youth: “How many days will it be, I wonder, And how will their slow length pass Till I shall find rest in silence under The trees and the waving grass?” “Not long now, perhaps,” he thought, wearily, for he felt strangely weak and faint, and his sufferings were most severe from his wound. He cleared his throat and slowly proceeded: “When I look back at that past time, Mr. Rodney, I am lost in wonder at the consummate young fool I was in those days. Would you believe me, sir, that in my infatuation for a girl I had never seen, but of whose perfections I had been told day by day for months, I proposed to marry Monsieur Sanson’s pretty little school-girl daughter?” “Impossible!” “I did, Mr. Rodney, and I was in the most serious earnest. Monsieur Sanson pretended to be shocked when I laid the matter before him, but promised that he would consider it, and assured me that he would have no objection to an American son-in-law, declaring that he admired Americans individually, and as a nation, to a most excessive degree. I was delighted at his blarney, which slipped from his tongue as easily as from a son of the Emerald Isle.” CHAPTER LVI. “Monsieur Sanson must have been a villain,” exclaimed Mr. Rodney, vehemently. “He saved my life once, and now he is dead. I scarcely feel at liberty to express my real opinion of the man,” said Mr. Delaney.