t," said the Marquis, "to the grandeur of the family,
merited by the manner in which the family has sustained its grandeur.
Hah!" And he took another gentle little pinch of snuff, and lightly
crossed his legs.

But when his nephew, leaning an elbow on the table, covered his eyes
thoughtfully and dejectedly with his hand, the fine mask looked at him
sideways with a stronger concentration of keenness, closeness, and
dislike than was comportable with its wearer's assumption of
indifference.

"Repression is the only lasting philosophy. The dark deference of fear
and slavery, my friend," observed the Marquis, "will keep the dogs
obedient to the whip, as long as this roof," looking up to it, "shuts
out the sky."

That might not be so long as the Marquis supposed. If a picture of the
chateau as it was to be a very few years hence, and of fifty like it as
they too were to be a very few years hence, could have been shown to him
that night, he might have been at a loss to claim his own from the
ghastly, fire-charred, plunder-wrecked ruins. As for the roof he
vaunted, he might have found _that_ shutting out the sky in a new
way--to wit, forever, from the eyes of the bodies into which its lead
was fired, out of the barrels of a hundred thousand muskets.

"Meanwhile," said the Marquis, "I will preserve the honor and repose of
the family, if you will not. But you must be fatigued. Shall we
terminate our conference for the night?"

"A moment more."

"An hour if you please."

"Sir," said the nephew, "we have done wrong, and are reaping the fruits
of wrong."

"_We_ have done wrong?" repeated the Marquis, with an inquiring smile,
and delicately pointing, first to his nephew, then to himself.

"Our family; our honorable family, whose honor is of so much account to
both of us, in such different ways. Even in my father's time we did a
world of wrong, injuring every human creature who came between us and
our pleasure, whatever it was. Why need I speak of my father's time,
when it is equally yours? Can I separate my father's twin brother, joint
inheritor, and next successor, from himself?"

"Death has done that!" said the Marquis.

"And has left me," answered the nephew, "bound to a system that is
frightful to me, responsible for it but powerless in it; seeking to
execute the last request of my dear mother's lips, and obey the last
look of my dear mother's eyes, which implored me to have mercy and to
redress; and tortured by se