uis appeared to M. de Baville to
compensate and more than compensate for the peccadillo of which he had
been accused; consequently, instead of prosecuting him, he entered into
secret communication with him, reassuring him about his stay in France,
and urging on his religious zeal; and in this manner twelve years passed
by.

During this time the marquise's young son, whom we saw at his mother's
deathbed, had reached the age of twenty, and being rich in his father's
possessions--which his uncle had restored to him--and also by his
mother's inheritance, which he had shared with his sister, had married
a girl of good family, named Mademoiselle de Moissac, who was both
rich and beautiful. Being called to serve in the royal army, the count
brought his young wife to the castle of Ganges, and, having fervently
commended her to his father, left her in his charge.

The Marquis de Ganges was forty-two veers old, and scarcely seemed
thirty; he was one of the handsomest men living; he fell in love with
his daughter-in-law and hoped to win her love, and in order to promote
this design, his first care was to separate from her, under the excuse
of religion, a maid who had been with her from childhood and to whom she
was greatly attached.

This measure, the cause of which the young marquise did not know,
distressed her extremely. It was much against her will that she had come
to live at all in this old castle of Ganges, which had so recently been
the scene of the terrible story that we have just told. She inhabited
the suite of rooms in which the murder had been committed; her
bedchamber was the same which had belonged to the late marquise; her bed
was the same; the window by which she had fled was before her eyes; and
everything, down to the smallest article of furniture, recalled to her
the details of that savage tragedy. But even worse was her case when
she found it no longer possible to doubt her father-in-law's intentions;
when she saw herself beloved by one whose very name had again and again
made her childhood turn pale with terror, and when she was left alone at
all hours of the day in the sole company of the man whom public rumour
still pursued as a murderer. Perhaps in any other place the poor lonely
girl might have found some strength in trusting herself to God; but
there, where God had suffered one of the fairest and purest creatures
that ever existed to perish by so cruel a death, she dared not appeal to
Him, for He seem