the hope of keeping her always by their side. Do not blame them too quickly, my friend; for it is a painful thought that during twenty years a child should have been the object of your affection and of your solicitude; that she should have taken the best and largest portion of your life and heart, in order that, one day, a stranger, under the title of a new-born love, should carry away from you all your joy; leaving you to see your much-loved child place herself under another protection than thine, and quit without regret the house where she leaves a blank that nothing else can fill. "I had almost forgotten to tell you that Antonia had married Adolphus, and lived happy and peaceful in this same castle where we now are finishing our career. Albert, tired of war, and freed from all further illusions of glory, had come, after having refused the highest distinctions of the order, to seek some repose by his brother's side. Ambition was dead in him; his soul, that had been so severely proved, had need of recollection and calm; and he found this by the side of him whom, after Flaminia, he loved the best in the world. Moreover, although he himself scarcely ever spoke of her who filled all his thoughts, still he felt a lively pleasure in hearing her spoken of so frequently by his brother and his wife. Albert was then calm and composed; he marched courageously forward in life as does the traveller who climbs with difficulty the bare paths of a desolate and arid mountain, sure to find in the evening the joys of the fireside and the shelter of his friends' roof. "Three years, day by day, had passed away since the moment when Albert had quitted the palace Balbo. It was the evening; Adolphus and Antonia were by his side, in this same saloon where we now are. {81} Contrary to his custom, Albert, for whom that anniversary was a day of mourning, felt his soul full of a penetrating and serene joy, when ten o'clock sounded from that same clock that--"