three times her hand, upon which no ring sparkled--that hand,
very supple and white, whose movements betrayed extreme nervousness. "I
have already said too much. It is not my business, and poor Fanny is only
to me a recent friend, although I think her very attractive and
affectionate.... When I think that she is on the point of pledging
herself for life, and that there is no one, that there can be no one, to
cry: They lie to you! I am filled with compassion. That is all. It is
childish!"

It is always painful to observe in a young person the exact perception of
the sinister dealings of life, which, once entered into the mind, never
allows of the carelessness so natural at the age of twenty.

The impression of premature disenchantment Alba Steno had many times
given to Dorsenne, and it had indeed been the principal attraction to the
curious observer of the feminine character, who still was struck by the
terrible absence of illusion which such a view of the projects of Fanny's
father revealed. Whence did she know them? Evidently from Madame Steno
herself. Either the Baron and the Countess had talked of them before the
young girl too openly to leave her in any doubt, or she had divined what
they did not tell her, through their conversation. On seeing her thus,
with her bitter mouth, her bright eyes, so visibly a prey to the fever of
suppressed loathing, Dorsenne again was impressed by the thought of her
perfect perspicacity. It was probable that she had applied the same force
of thought to her mother's conduct. It seemed to him that on raising, as
she was doing, the wick of the silver lamp beneath the large teakettle,
that she was glancing sidewise at the terrace, where the end of the
Countess's white robe could be seen through the shadow. Suddenly the mad
thoughts which had so greatly agitated him on the previous day possessed
him again, and the plan he had formed of imitating his model, Hamlet, in
playing in Madame Steno's salon the role of the Danish prince before his
uncle occurred to him. Absently, with his customary air of indifference,
he continued:

"Rest assured, Ardea does not lack enemies. Hafner, too, has plenty of
them. Some one will be found to denounce their plot, if there is a plot,
to lovely Fanny. An anonymous letter is so quickly written."

He had no sooner uttered those words than he interrupted himself with the
start of a man who handles a weapon which he thinks unloaded and which
suddenly discharge