s! That is what you have missed, Raoul."

"A friend!" cried Raoul, "I have wanted a friend!"

"M. de Guiche is an agreeable companion," resumed the comte, coldly,
"but I believe, in the times in which you live, men are more engaged in
their own interests and their own pleasures than they were in ours. You
have sought a secluded life; that is a great happiness, but you have
lost your strength thereby. We four, more weaned from those delicate
abstractions that constitute your joy, furnished much more resistance
when misfortune presented itself."

"I have not interrupted you, monsieur, to tell you that I had a friend,
and that that friend is M. de Guiche. _Certes_, he is good and generous,
and moreover he loves me. But I have lived under the guardianship of
another friendship, monsieur, as precious and as strong as that of which
you speak, since it is yours."

"I have not been a friend for you, Raoul," said Athos.

"Eh! monsieur, and in what respect not?"

"Because I have given you reason to think that life has but one face,
because, sad and severe, alas! I have always cut off for you, without,
God knows, wishing to do so, the joyous buds that spring incessantly
from the fair tree of youth; so that at this moment I repent of not
having made of you a more expansive, dissipated, animated man."

"I know why you say that, monsieur. No, it is not you who have made me
what I am; it was love, which took me at the time when children only
have inclinations; it is the constancy natural to my character, which
with other creatures is but habit. I believed that I should always be as
I was; I thought God had cast me in a path quite clear, quite straight,
bordered with fruits and flowers. I had ever watching over me your
vigilance and strength. I believed myself to be vigilant and strong.
Nothing prepared me; I fell once, and that once deprived me of courage
for the whole of my life. It is quite true that I wrecked myself. Oh,
no, monsieur! you are nothing in my past but happiness--in my future but
hope! No, I have no reproach to make against life such as you made it
for me; I bless you, and I love you ardently."

"My dear Raoul, your words do me good. They prove to me that you will
act a little for me in the time to come."

"I shall only act for you, monsieur."

"Raoul, what I have never hitherto done with respect to you, I will
henceforward do. I will be your friend, not your father. We will live in
expanding ourselves, inst