"I need no one to avenge my wrong. Let this pass."
"Not yet. Louise, you say, fled with a seducer? So proud as she was, I can scarcely believe it."
"Oh, it was not with a roturier she fled; her pride would not have allowed that."
"He must have deceived her somehow. Did she continue to live with him?"
"That question, at least, I can answer; for though I lost all trace of her life, his life was pretty well known to me till its end; and a very few months after she fled he was enchained to another. Let us talk of her no more."
"Ay, ay," muttered De Mauleon, "some disgraces are not to be redeemed, and therefore not to be discussed. To me, though a relation, Louise Duval was but little known, and after what you tell me, I cannot dispute your right to say, 'Talk of her no more.' You loved her, and she wronged you. My poor Louvier, pardon me if I made an old wound bleed afresh."
These words were said with a certain pathetic tenderness; they softened
Louvier towards the speaker.
After a short pause the Vicomte swept his hand over his brow, as if to dismiss from his mind a painful and obtrusive thought; then with a changed expression of countenance,—an expression frank and winning,— with voice and with manner in which no vestige remained of the irony or the haughtiness with which he had resented the frigidity of his reception, he drew his chair still nearer to Louvier's, and resumed: "Our situations, Paul Louvier, are much changed since we two became friends. I then could say, 'Open sesame' to whatever recesses, forbidden to vulgar footsteps, the adventurer whom I took by the hand might wish to explore. In those days my heart was warm; I liked you, Louvier,—honestly liked you. I think our personal acquaintance commenced in some gay gathering of young viveurs, whose behaviour to you offended my sense of good breeding?"
Louvier coloured and muttered inaudibly. De Mauleon continued: "I felt it due to you to rebuke their incivilities, the more so as you evinced on that occasion your own superiority in sense and temper, permit me to add, with no lack of becoming spirit."
Louvier bowed his head, evidently gratified.