more terror.
That name, spoken but twice or thrice in my hearing, had each time
brought its omen of evil.

It was the same with whose acquaintance Marie de Meudon charged me in
the garden of Versailles; the same who brought the _Chouans_ to the
guillotine, and had so nearly involved myself in their ruin; and now I
heard of him as one whose dreadful life had been a course of perfidy and
crime,--one who blasted all around him, and scattered ruin as he went.

"I have little more to add," resumed the general, after a long pause,
and in a voice whose weakened accents evinced how fearfully the
remembrance he called up affected him. "What remains, too, more
immediately concerns myself than others. I am the last of my house. An
ancient family, and one not undistinguished in the annals of France,
hangs but on the feeble thread of a withered and broken old man's life,
with whom it dies. My only brother fell in the Austrian campaign. I
never had a sister. Uncles and cousins I have had in numbers; but death
and exile have been rife these last twenty years, and, save myself, none
bears the name of D'Auvergne.

"Yet once I nourished the hope of a family,--of a race who should hand
down the ancient virtues of our house to after years. I thought of those
gallant ancestors whose portraits graced the walls of the old chateau
I was born in, and fancied myself leading my infant boy from picture
to picture, as I pointed out the brave and the good who had been his
forefathers. But this is a dream long since dispelled. I was then a
youth, scarce older than yourself, rich, and with every prospect of
happiness before me. I fell in love, and the object of my passion
seemed one created to have made the very paradise I sought for. She was
beautiful, beyond even the loveliest of a handsome Court; high-born and
gifted. But her heart was bestowed on another,--one who, unlike myself,
encouraged no daring thoughts, no ambitious longings, but who, wholly
devoted to her he loved, sought in tranquil quiet the happiness such
spirits can give each other. She told me herself frankly, as I speak
now to you, that she could not be mine; and then placed my hand in her
husband's. This was Marie de Rochefort, the mother of Mademoiselle de
Meudon.

"The world's changes seem ever to bring about these strange vicissitudes
by which our early deeds of good and evil are brought more forcibly to
our memories, and we are made to think over the past by some accident o