"No, thank you," again responded Frank; "there are a great many people about——. There! I feel slightly better."
"As you like," said Jacques, who by-the-by was not in the least inclined to accompany the young man.
"I'll go alone," said Frank; "Good-night."
"Good-night, Sir, I hope you'll be better soon," said Jacques, as each one betook himself towards his home.
Frank was completely weighed down with this piece of unexpected and unwelcome news. He did not go to the carpenter's residence; he forgot all about it. He went straight home. How he arrived there, which road he took, which door he entered by, he did not know; but he found himself in his bedroom, seated on a chair and gazing into space in blank despair.
This was the end of everything.
He pictured to himself her lover. He did not know him, but he succeeded in forming in his mind one of the biggest monsters that ever inhabited the globe in the shape of man.
And Adèle; he knew she must have been forced into it by her father. "How she must groan under this yoke. To have to listen to that vicious being with the prospect of one day being his wife." Why had it come to this, why was the world so formed. Ah! the wicked world we live in, the abominable, corrupted world. When would the millennium come. When would all this unhappiness be swept away from the earth's surface.
Alas! he would die before that time; so would thousands and millions of others.