To have daughters!--one gives her life to a scoundrel, the other, my Modeste, falls a victim to whom?
a coward, who deceives her with the gilded paper of a poet.

If it were Canalis himself it might not be so bad; but that Scapin of a lover!--I will strangle him with my two hands," he cried, making an involuntary gesture of furious determination.

"And what then?
suppose my Modeste were to die of grief ?" He gazed mechanically out of the windows of the hotel des Princes, and then returned to the sofa, where he sat motionless.

The fatigues of six voyages to India, the anxieties of speculation, the dangers he had encountered and evaded, and his many griefs, had silvered Charles Mignon's head.

His handsome soldierly face, so pure in outline and now bronzed by the suns of China and the southern seas, had acquired an air of dignity which his present grief rendered almost sublime.
"Mongenod told me he felt confidence in the young man who is coming to ask me for my daughter," he thought at last; and at this moment Ernest de La Briere was announced by one of the servants whom Monsieur de La Bastie had attached to himself during the last four years.
"You have come, monsieur, from my friend Mongenod ?" he said.
"Yes," replied Ernest, growing timid when he saw before him a face as sombre as Othello's.