Have you forgotten what I promised you
in return for your confidence? and a promise to you have I ever yet
broken?"

"Father! father! I am so wretched and so ashamed of myself for being
wretched! Forgive me. No, I do not forget your promise; but who can
promise to dispose of the heart of another? and that heart will never be
mine. But bear with me a little, I shall soon recover."

"Valerie, when I made you the promise you now think I cannot keep, I
spoke only from that conviction of power to promote the happiness of a
child which nature implants in the heart of parents; and it may be also
from the experience of my own strength of will, since that which I have
willed I have always won. Now I speak on yet surer ground. Before the
year is out you shall be the beloved wife of Alain de Rochebriant. Dry
your tears and smile on me, Valerie. If you will not see in me mother
and father both, I have double love for you, motherless child of her
who shared the poverty of my youth, and did not live to enjoy the wealth
which I hold as a trust for that heir to mine all which she left me."

As this man thus spoke you would scarcely have recognized in him the
old saturnine Duplessis, his countenance became so beautified by the
one soft feeling which care and contest, ambition and money-seeking, had
left unaltered in his heart. Perhaps there is no country in which the
love of parent and child, especially of father and daughter, is so
strong as it is in France; even in the most arid soil, among the
avaricious, even among the profligate, it forces itself into flower.
Other loves fade away: in the heart of the true Frenchman that parent
love blooms to the last. Valerie felt the presence of that love as a
divine protecting guardianship. She sank on her knees and covered his
hand with grateful kisses.

"Do not torture yourself, my child, with jealous fears of the fair
Italian. Her lot and Alain de Rochebriant's can never unite; and
whatever you may think of their whispered converse, Alain's heart at
this moment is too filled with anxious troubles to leave one spot in it
accessible even to a frivolous gallantry. It is for us to remove these
troubles; and then, when he turns his eyes towards you, it will be
with the gaze of one who beholds his happiness. You do not weep now,
Valerie!"

BOOK IX.

CHAPTER I.

On waking some morning, have you ever felt, reader, as if a change for
the brighter in the world, without and within