en reading your 'Pollnitz Memoirs,' and want
to talk to you about them. You know I can talk to no one as I can to
you."

"You do me much honor," said Falkenstein, rather formally. He was
wondering in his mind whether she _had_ refused Forester or not.

"What a cold, distant speech! It is very unkind of you to answer me so.
What is the matter with you, Count Waldemar?"

She always called him by the title he had dropped in English society;
she had a fervent reverence for his historic _antecedens_; and besides,
as she told him one day, "she liked to call him something no one else
did."

"Matter with me? Nothing at all, I assure you," he answered, still
distantly.

"You are not like yourself, at all events," persisted Valerie. "You
should be kind to me. I have so few who are."

The tone touched him; he smiled, but did not speak, as he sat down by
her poking up the turf with his stick.

"Count Waldemar," said Valerie, suddenly, brushing Spit's hair off his
bright little eyes, "do tell me; hasn't something vexed you?"

"Nothing new," answered Falkenstein, with a short laugh. "The same
entanglements and annoyances that have been netting their toils round me
for many years--that is all. I am young enough, as time counts, yet I
give you my word I have as little hope in my future, and I know as well
what my life will be as if I were fourscore."

"Hush, don't say so," said Valerie, with a gesture of pain. "You are so
worthy of happiness; your nature was made to be happy; and if you are
not, fate has misused you cruelly."

"Fate? there is no such thing. I have been a fool, and my folly is now
working itself out. I have made my own life, and I have nobody but
myself to thank for it."

"I don't know that. Circumstances, temptation, education, opportunity,
association, often take the place of the Parcae, and gild or cut the
threads of our destiny."

"No. I don't accept that doctrine," said Falkenstein, always much
sterner judge to himself than anybody would have been to him. "What I
have done has been with my eyes open. I have known the price I should
pay for my pleasures, but I never paused to count it. I never stopped
for any obstacle, and for what I desired, I would, like the men in the
old legends, have sold myself to the devil. Now, of course, I am
hampered with ten thousand embarrassments. You are young; you are a
woman; you cannot understand the reckless madness which will drink the
wine to-day, though one's lif