"_I do believe_," answered Maurice, in a tone of greater solemnity than the occasion seemed to demand; but there was a world of meaning in those three words. We should be obliged to employ many if we attempted to express a tithe of what he had recently learned to _believe_ through the instrumentality of a noble thinker.
A week later, Ronald folded his mother to his throbbing heart, and tenderly bade her adieu; but, without feeling that he should be parted from her by their material separation. Strange to say, his farewell to his father and Maurice was shadowed by a nearer approach to sadness and a more definite sense of sundering. Possibly their spirits had less power than his mother's to annihilate space and follow him whithersoever he went.
Maurice was induced to linger a few days longer as the guest of his new friends, and his presence prevented the void left by the departure of a beloved and only son from being too keenly felt. At the commencement of a new week the young viscount removed to Charleston. That city was only a few miles distant from the residence of Ronald's parents. Mr. Walton had made his visitor acquainted with an eminent lawyer, who consented to receive Maurice de Gramont as a student.
Count Tristan at first violently opposed his son's step, but he could not, with any show of reason, forbid his studying law as a _pastime_. The count's affairs became more and more entangled, and he grew more desirous than ever that his son should contract a wealthy marriage. The hope that Maurice might woo and win one of those numerous heiresses, who, Frenchmen imagine, abound in the Southern El Dorado, alone reconciled the haughty nobleman to his son's sojourn in America.
While Maurice was applying himself to study with a zeal and sense of enjoyment wholly new to him, Bertha was passing through various stages of ennui, and testing the patience, or rather the digestive powers, of that sorely discomforted _bon vivant_, her uncle. Day after day she grew more capricious, unreasonable, unmanageable.
The distressed marquis came to the conclusion that his disturbed animal economy could only be restored by an amicable separation from his niece. But in vain he bestowed his smiles, and his _dinners_, upon the multitudinous suitors by whom the young heiress was besieged; her autocratic decree condemned him to the cruel duty of closing the sumptuous repasts by the _dessert_ of a dismissal to each lover in turn, without extending to any the faintest hope that his sentence might be reversed. Finally the marquis became a confirmed dyspeptic; the joy of his life was quenched when his appetite failed, beyond the resuscitating influence of _absenthe_ and other fashionable stimulants; the glory of his festive board had departed, and he was haunted by the conviction that the unnatural conduct of his niece would bring his whitening hairs, through sorrow and indigestion, to the grave.