"Nay, the secret of my sincere commiseration with the woes of others consists in my having deeply suffered myself,--nay, in still sighing over heavy sorrows none can alleviate or cure." "You, my lord! Surely you cannot have tasted thus bitterly of grief and misfortune?" "Yes, 'tis even so. I sometimes think that I have been made to taste of nearly every bitter which fills our cup of worldly sorrows, the better to fit me for sympathising with all descriptions of worldly trials. Wounded and sorely afflicted as a friend, a husband, and a parent, what grief can there be in which I am not qualified to participate?" "I always understood, my lord, that your late wife, the grand duchess, left no child?" "True; but, before I became her husband, I was the father of a daughter, who died quite young. And, however you may smile at the idea, I can with truth assert that the loss of that child has poisoned all my subsequent days. And this grief increases with my years. Each succeeding hour but redoubles the poignancy of my regrets, which, far from abating, appear to grow,--strengthen, even as my daughter would have done had she been spared me. She would now have been in her seventeenth year." "And her mother," asked Clemence, after a trifling hesitation, "is she still living?" "Oh, name her not, I beseech you!" exclaimed Rodolph, whose features became suddenly overcast at this reference to Sarah. "She to whom you allude is a vile, unworthy woman, whose feelings are completely buried beneath the cold selfishness and ambition of her nature. Sometimes I even ask myself whether it is not better that my child has been removed by death than for her to have been contaminated by the example of such a mother." Clemence could not restrain a feeling of satisfaction at hearing Rodolph thus express himself. "In that case," said she, "I can imagine how doubly you must bewail the loss of your only object of affection!"