as
the solemn assurance she made him in her last hour, capable of affording
him a stronger conviction of her blameless conduct.

In the first horrors of remorse and despair, he felt inclined to deliver
up himself and the woman, who had plunged him into this abyss of guilt,
into the hands of justice; but, when the paroxysm of his suffering
was over, his intention changed. Laurentini, however, he saw only once
afterwards, and that was, to curse her as the instigator of his crime,
and to say, that he spared her life only on condition, that she
passed the rest of her days in prayer and penance. Overwhelmed with
disappointment, on receiving contempt and abhorrence from the man,
for whose sake she had not scrupled to stain her conscience with
human blood, and, touched with horror of the unavailing crime she had
committed, she renounced the world, and retired to the monastery of St.
Claire, a dreadful victim to unresisted passion.

The Marquis, immediately after the death of his wife, quitted
Chateau-le-Blanc, to which he never returned, and endeavoured to lose
the sense of his crime amidst the tumult of war, or the dissipations
of a capital; but his efforts were vain; a deep dejection hung over him
ever after, for which his most intimate friend could not account, and
he, at length, died, with a degree of horror nearly equal to that, which
Laurentini had suffered. The physician, who had observed the singular
appearance of the unfortunate Marchioness, after death, had been bribed
to silence; and, as the surmises of a few of the servants had proceeded
no further than a whisper, the affair had never been investigated.
Whether this whisper ever reached the father of the Marchioness, and,
if it did, whether the difficulty of obtaining proof deterred him from
prosecuting the Marquis de Villeroi, is uncertain; but her death was
deeply lamented by some part of her family, and particularly by her
brother, M. St. Aubert; for that was the degree of relationship, which
had existed between Emily's father and the Marchioness; and there is no
doubt, that he suspected the manner of her death. Many letters passed
between the Marquis and him, soon after the decease of his beloved
sister, the subject of which was not known, but there is reason to
believe, that they related to the cause of her death; and these were the
papers, together with some letters of the Marchioness, who had confided
to her brother the occasion of her unhappiness, which St