creature. It is not we, it is he who is poor
and miserable in all his despicable riches, for he stands there in the
most gruesome, comfortless loneliness. There is not one loving heart in
the wide world to cling to his breast, to open to him when he is like
to despair of life--of himself. Come, father, away from this house with
me; let us go as quickly as we can, that the horrible creature may not
gloat over our sorrow.'

"Vertua sank half senseless into a chair, whilst Angela knelt down
before him, took his hands, kissed them and stroked them, and told
over, with childlike prolixity, all the accomplishments and
acquirements which she possessed, with which she would be able to
support him comfortably, imploring him with the warmest tears to have
no fear, inasmuch as life would, for the first time in her experience,
begin to possess a real value and delightsomeness for her when--not for
the enjoying of it, but for her father--she should stitch, sew, sing,
play the guitar.

"What obdurate sinner could have remained indifferent at the sight of
Angela beaming in the fulness of her heavenly beauty, comforting her
old father with sweet, delicious words, the deepest affection, and the
most childlike purity and goodness streaming from the depths of her
heart?

"Things were very different with the Chevalier. An entire pandemonium
of torture and pangs of conscience awoke within him. Angela seemed to
him to be the punishing angel of God, before whose shining glory the
cloud-shroud of sinful deception which had surrounded him vanished
away, so that with terror he clearly saw himself in all his repulsive
nakedness.

"And through the midst of those hell-flames, which were consuming and
raging in his heart, there came piercing a heavenly, pure beam of
radiance, whose light was the sweetest bliss and the very joy of
heaven, though the brightness of this ray had the effect of rendering
the inexpressible torture more terrible.

"The Chevalier had never known love before; and the instant he saw
Angela he was seized by the most passionate affection for her, and, at
the same time, with the destroying pain of complete hopelessness, for
surely there could be no hope for one who had appeared to her in the
light in which he had.

"He longed to say something, but his tongue seemed to be paralysed. At
length he so far mastered himself as to say, stammering, and in a
trembling voice, 'Signor Vertua, listen. I have not won anything from
y