"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 Valérie, 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 Parcæ, 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 life paid for it to-morrow. Screened from opportunity, fenced in by education, position, and society, you cannot know how impossible it is to a man, whose very energies and strength become his tempters, to put a check upon himself in the vortex of pleasure round him——"
"Yes," interrupted Valérie, "I can. Feeling for you, I can sympathise in all things with you. Had I been a man, I should have done as you have done, drunk the ambrosia without heeding its cost. Go on—I love to hear you speak of yourself; and I know your real nature, Count Waldemar, into whatever errors or hasty acts repented of in cooler moments the hot spirit of your race may have led you."
Falkenstein was pleased, despite himself, half amused, half saddened. He turned it off with a laugh. "By Heaven, I wish they had made a brewer of me—I might now be as rich and free from care as your uncle."
"You a brewer!" cried Valérie. Her father, a poor gentleman, had left her his aristocratic leanings. "What an absurd idea! All the old Falkensteins would come out of their crypts, and chanceries, and cloisters, to see the coronet surmounting the beer vats!"
He smiled at her vehemence. "The coronet! I had better have full pockets than empty titles."
"For shame!" cried Valérie. "Yes, bark at him, Spit dear; he is telling stories. You do not mean it; you know you are proud of your glorious name. Who would not rather be a Falkenstein on a hundred a year, than a Cashranger on a thousand?"