aken Julie.

"I had a painful interview with M. Selby. I announced my intention to
separate from him. I alleged as a reason my conscientious repugnance
to live with a professed heretic--an enemy to our Holy Church. When M.
Selby found that he could not shake my resolution, he lent himself to
it with the forbearance and generosity which he had always exhibited. On
our marriage he had settled on me five thousand pounds, to be absolutely
mine in the event of his death. He now proposed to concede to me the
interest on that capital during his life, and he undertook the charge
of my step-daughter Isaura, and secured to her all the rest he had to
leave; such landed property as he possessed in England passing to a
distant relative.

"So we parted, not with hostility--tears were shed on both sides. I
set out for Coblentz. Madame Surville had long since quitted that town,
devoting some years to the round of various mineral spas in vain hope of
cure. Not without some difficulty I traced her to her last residence
in the neighbourhood of Paris, but she was then no more--her death
accelerated by the shock occasioned by the loss of her whole fortune,
which she had been induced to place in one of the numerous fraudulent
companies by which so many have been ruined. Julie, who was with her at
the time of her death, had disappeared shortly after it--none could tell
me whither; but from such hints as I could gather, the poor child, thus
left destitute, had been betrayed into sinful courses.

"Probably I might yet by searching inquiry have found her out; you will
say it was my duty at least to institute such inquiry. No doubt; I
now remorsefully feel that it was. I did not think so at the time. The
Italian priest had given me a few letters of introduction to French
ladies with whom, when they had sojourned at Florence, he had made
acquaintance. These ladies were very strict devotees, formal observers
of those decorums by which devotion proclaims itself to the world. They
had received me not only with kindness but with marked respect. They
chose to exalt into the noblest self-sacrifice the act of my leaving
M. Selby's house. Exaggerating the simple cause assigned to it in the
priest's letter, they represented me as quitting a luxurious home and
an idolising husband rather than continue intimate intercourse with the
enemy of my religion. This new sort of flattery intoxicated me with its
fumes. I recoiled from the thought of shattering the p