The three friends embraced Monte-Leone, and Von Apsberg said, "You knew this, yet could share our gayety. Did you not say yourself laughter is as necessary for digestion as it is to the heart?" "I fulfilled my duties of host to the letter. I needed all my courage, though, having lost more than my fortune--my happiness. The morning's papers will announce the failure of Antonio Lamberti, and all Paris will know of the ruin of the brilliant Count Monte-Leone." With fortune, the Count had also lost the hope of happiness. The widowhood of the Marquise de Maulear had revived all his hopes, as La Felina had foreseen, and his rank and title enabled him again to aspire to Aminta's hand. All this prospect his misfortune annihilated. What had he to offer now to Aminta? The name, the eclat of which he could sustain no longer--an existence endangered by a political plot, the triumph of which was far from certain--sumptuous tastes, which he would not be permitted to gratify--privations, especially cruel as they would follow closely on luxury and opulence, of which he had, so to say, built himself a temple. Ten months had passed by since the Marquis's death, and the grief of his widow had been most sincere. Though Aminta had never entertained a very profound love for her husband, she had been much attached to him from a reason common enough: she was strong and he unusually weak. When, therefore, a terrible vice had seized on him, and sought, as it were, to wrest him from her arms, not a reproach had been uttered by Aminta against the sacrifice of her money and his neglect to an ignoble propensity. She forgave the gamester who was faithful to her, and had wept over him when she would have had no tears for the unfaithful husband. This soul so full of love was not slumbering in the arms of marriage. The energetical character which Aminta had often exhibited would, had it found traits of manhood properly expanded in her husband, have possibly modified her feelings, if he had possessed that burning imagination, that secret imagination which creates deep love, and for which too she seemed to have been created. She might have said this. She was too chaste to do so. Yet sometimes, in her long and dreamy solitudes, an image rose before her, especially when her husband was away. She dreamed of an exalted love, full of ardor and devotion, indomitable courage, sacrifice of life to duty, a noble and generous soul, which divined her own, and linked itself to it. All this assumed the form of the man she had rejected, of whom she had been afraid, and for her ingratitude to whom she now blushed.