"That was five years ago, Michel! The palace which you see at this moment, so resplendent, with its doors wide open, and filled with people, was just the same a month ago as it was at the time of which I am telling you, just the same as it had then been during the five years that had passed since she was left an orphan and mistress of her own life, and as it probably will be again to-morrow. It was a tomb in which she seemed to have buried herself alive. All the treasures to-day spread out for everyone to see were buried in darkness under layers of dust, like relics of the dead in a tomb. Two or three servants, dismal and silent, walked noiselessly through the long galleries closed to the sunlight and the outer air. On all sides thick curtains hanging before the windows, doors which refused to swing on their rusty hinges, an air of solemn neglect, statues standing erect in the shadow like ghosts, family portraits that followed you with their eyes with a distrustful air. I was frightened, and yet I walked on. The house was not so jealously guarded as I expected. It had invisible sentinels in its reputation for inhospitable gloom and the dread of its loneliness. I carried thither the insane audacity of my twenty years, the ill-fated rashness of a heart enamored in anticipation, and rushing headlong to its destruction. "By a chance which seemed like fatality, I was not questioned by anyone. The few servants of that dismal abode did not see me, or did not think of preventing me from proceeding, relying, perhaps, upon some Cerberus nearer to the person of their mistress, whose duty it was to guard the door of her apartments, and who, by some miracle, happened not to be there. "Instinct or destiny guided me. I passed through several rooms, I put aside heavy, dust-covered portières; I passed through one more open door and found myself in a very richly furnished room, where a full-length portrait of a man occupied a panel of the wall directly opposite me. I stopped. That portrait sent a shudder through my veins. I recognized it from my father's description of the original, whose character was then a much more common subject of anecdote and gossip among our people than the peculiarities of the princess. It was the portrait of Dionigi Palmarosa, Princess Agatha's father, and I must tell you something of that terrible man, Michel; for it may be that you have not as yet heard his name in this country, where nobody mentions it except in fear and trembling. Indeed, I see that I should have mentioned him to you before, for the hatred and terror which his memory inspires would have explained to you in some measure the distrust, and even malevolence with which his daughter, despite all her virtues, is regarded by some persons of our station in life.