"After a little he left Vienna, shut himself up in his castle, and would see no one.
"In England they would have tried at the '_de lunatico_' statute; but his next of kin left him in peace, biding their time as patiently as they could. They had not to wait long; in four years a good constitution broke up, suddenly at last, and the count exchanged stupor for a sleep with his fathers, without benefit of clergy. Perhaps they would not have given him absolution, for he died certainly not in charity with all men."
"I don't know," Mrs. Bellasys objected, with a timid obstinacy; "I can not argue with you; but I am sure it was very wrong."
I struck in to the meek little woman's rescue.
"That's right, Mrs. Bellasys, don't let him put you down with the high hand; it's always his way when truth is against him; but I never knew him break down a stubborn fact yet."
"Frank, I have often remarked in you, with pain, quite a feminine propensity to theorize. Women _will_ do it. My dear Mrs. Bellasys, don't look so dreadfully like an accusing angel about to bring me to book; you know I am a hopeless heretic. They get up a sort of _Memoria Technica_ in early youth, and it clings to them all their life through. If they go astray, they never cease proclaiming aloud that 'they know it's very wrong;' though eminently unpractical, they think it due to themselves to pet certain abstract truths (circumstances don't affect them in the least), like that priestess of Cotytto, who said to the magistrate, through her tears, 'I may have been unfortunate, but I've always been respectable!' Sometimes principle gets the pull over passion, but, in such a case, regrets come as often afterward as remorse does in the reverse. I was reading a French story the other day--" He checked himself with a laugh. "Bah! I am in the prosaic vein, it seems, anecdoting like the old knave of clubs."
"Will you go on?" Flora said, leaning over toward him, her eyes glittering in the firelight.
The thrill in her voice--strangely contagious it was--told how much she was interested. I do not wonder at it. There was only one man on earth for whom she had ever really cared--he sat beside her then--and, I believe, what attracted her most in him was the daring disregard of opinions, conventionalities, and more sacred things yet, which carried him on straight to the accomplishment of his thought or purpose. In those days, if either were an obstacle, he flinched no more before a great moral law than at a big fence.