tunate enough to discover,
and to whom I intrust my fate; and even if you could learn the
shelter I have sought, and have the audacity to molest me, you would
but subject yourself to the chastisement you so richly deserve.

Louise DUVAL.

At the perusal of this cold-hearted, ungrateful letter, the love I had
felt for this woman--already much shaken by her wayward and perverse
temper--vanished from my heart, never to return. But as an honest
man, my conscience was terribly stung. Could it be possible that I
had unknowingly deceived her,--that our marriage was not legal? When
I recovered from the stun which was the first effect of her letter, I
sought the opinion of an avoue in the neighbourbood, named Sartiges, and
to my dismay, I learned that while I, marrying according to the customs
of my own country, was legally bound to Louise in England, and could
not marry another, the marriage was in all ways illegal for her,--being
without the consent of her relations while she was under age; without
the ceremonials of the Roman Catholic Church,--to which, though I never
heard any profession of religious belief from her or her father, it
might fairly be presumed that she belonged; and, above all, without the
form of civil contract which is indispensable to the legal marriage of a
French subject.

The avoue said that the marriage, therefore, in itself was null, and
that Louise could, without incurring legal penalties for bigamy,
marry again in France according to the French laws; but that under the
circumstances it was probable that her next of kin would apply on her
behalf to the proper court for the formal annulment of the marriage,
which would be the most effectual mode of saving her from any
molestation on my part, and remove all possible questions hereafter as
to her single state and absolute right to remarry. I had better remain
quiet, and wait for intimation of further proceedings. I knew not what
else to do, and necessarily submitted.

From this wretched listlessness of mind, alternated now by vehement
resentment against Louise, now by the reproach of my own sense of honour
in leaving that honour in so questionable a point of view, I was aroused
by a letter from the distant kinsman by whom hitherto I had been so
neglected. In the previous year he had lost one of his two children; the
other was just dead. No nearer relation now surviving stood between me
and my chance of inheritance from hi