feeling: but still it was all very, very different from my intense participation in the passions and the sorrows of Monsieur and Madame de Villardin, and equally so from the sensations of gloom and awe, which the sad events that were passing around me impressed upon my mind. The effect of my conversations with Father Ferdinand I have already related; and under the influence of the whole together, I found my heart losing rapidly its boyish lightness, and becoming, day by day, susceptible of more deep and powerful sympathies than I ever dreamed it was possible to feel. If I may use the expression, during the last six months I had been educated in the school of dark and vehement passions, and the lessons that I had received had been at least so far instructive as to teach me, whatever I felt, to feel deeply. The boldness and decision of my conduct in former times had proceeded both from the promptness of determination which my father had inculcated, and from the habit which I had acquired amidst scenes of turbulence and confusion, of valuing human life and all connected with it as a mere nothing; but now, although I had learned to estimate almost everything differently, yet, by having been taught to feel a deep and personal interest in all with whom I became connected, I had acquired a new and stronger motive for exercising the same promptitude in all circumstances, and employing even more vigorously than before all the best energies of my mind. Such had become my feelings at the time when Monsieur de Villardin recovered; and, even in watching by his sick bed, I had experienced the greatest difference between the sensations which I then felt towards him, and those which I remembered having undergone in attending upon Lord Masterton under somewhat similar circumstances. For Lord Masterton, indeed, I had felt as much affection and more esteem; but towards Monsieur de Villardin pity and regret, and many other mingled sensations, rendered my feelings of interest far more deep and intense. There were memories and ties between us that could never be broken; there was the confidence of dark and secret acts that could never be forgotten--there was many a deed of kindness and of feeling, too, which no conduct towards others could cancel as regarded myself; and even my very suspicions in respect to the last terrible catastrophe were in themselves a source of mournful, painful, but profound interest.