s
you might drive me,--you share my fate; and mark me, you are delivered
up to my revenge! You cease to be my son,--you are my foe. Child! you
know me."

The boy, bold as he was, shuddered; but after a pause so brief that a
breath scarce passed between his silence and his words, he replied with
emphasis,--

"Father, you have read my heart. I have been persuaded by Lucretia (for
she bewitches me) to watch you,--at least, when you are with Sir Miles.
I knew that this was mixed up with Mr. Mainwaring. Now that you have
made me understand your own views, I will be true to you,--true without
threats."

The father looked hard on him, and seemed satisfied with the gaze.
"Remember, at least, that your future rests upon your truth; that is no
threat,--that is a thought of hope. Now sleep or muse on it." He dropped
the curtain which his hand had drawn aside, and stole from the room
as noiselessly as he had entered. The boy slept no more. Deceit and
cupidity and corrupt ambition were at work in his brain. Shrink back,
Moon and Starbeam! On that child's brow play the demons who had followed
the father's step to his bed of sleep.

Back to his own room, close at hand, crept Olivier Dalibard. The walls
were lined with books,--many in language and deep in lore. Moon and
Starbeam, ye love the midnight solitude of the scholar! The Provencal
stole to the casement, and looked forth. All was serene,--breathless
trees and gleaming sculpture and whitened sward, girdled by the mass of
shadow. Of what thought the man? Not of the present loveliness which
the scene gave to his eye, nor of the future mysteries which the stars
should whisper to the soul. Gloomily over a stormy and a hideous past
roved the memory, stored with fraud and foul with crime,--plan upon
plan, schemed with ruthless wisdom, followed up by remorseless daring,
and yet all now a ruin and a blank; an intellect at war with good,
and the good had conquered! But the conviction neither touched the
conscience nor enlightened the reason; he felt, it is true, a moody
sense of impotence, but it brought rage, not despondency. It was not
that he submitted to Good as too powerful to oppose, but that he deemed
he had not yet gained all the mastery over the arsenal of Evil. And evil
he called it not. Good and evil to him were but subordinate genii at the
command of Mind; they were the slaves of the lamp. But had he got at the
true secret of the lamp itself? "How is it," he thought, as h