mes to think
that with so much majesty there appeared but little tenderness; he took,
however, the merits with the faults, and was content upon the whole.

If the Provencal had taken more than common pains with his young pupil,
the pains were not solely disinterested. In plunging her mind amidst
that profound corruption which belongs only to intellect cultivated
in scorn of good and in suppression of heart, he had his own views to
serve. He watched the age when the passions ripen, and he grasped at
the fruit which his training sought to mature. In the human heart ill
regulated there is a dark desire for the forbidden. This Lucretia felt;
this her studies cherished, and her thoughts brooded over. She detected,
with the quickness of her sex, the preceptor's stealthy aim. She
started not at the danger. Proud of her mastery over herself, she rather
triumphed in luring on into weakness this master-intelligence which had
lighted up her own,--to see her slave in her teacher; to despise or to
pity him whom she had first contemplated with awe. And with this mere
pride of the understanding might be connected that of the sex; she had
attained the years when woman is curious to know and to sound her power.
To inflame Dalibard's cupidity or ambition was easy; but to touch his
heart,--that marble heart!--this had its dignity and its charm. Strange
to say, she succeeded; the passion, as well as interests, of this
dangerous and able man became enlisted in his hopes. And now the game
played between them had a terror in its suspense; for if Dalibard
penetrated not into the recesses of his pupil's complicated nature, she
was far from having yet sounded the hell that lay, black and devouring,
beneath his own. Not through her affections,--those he scarce hoped
for,--but through her inexperience, her vanity, her passions, he
contemplated the path to his victory over her soul and her fate. And so
resolute, so wily, so unscrupulous was this person, who had played upon
all the subtlest keys and chords in the scale of turbulent life, that,
despite the lofty smile with which Lucretia at length heard and repelled
his suit, he had no fear of the ultimate issue, when all his projects
were traversed, all his mines and stratagems abruptly brought to a
close, by an event which he had wholly unforeseen,--the appearance of
a rival; the ardent and almost purifying love, which, escaping a while
from all the demons he had evoked, she had, with a girl's frank