see there something invisible to human eyes. The baron took up a little
book that was lying upon the table, glanced at the familiar arms stamped
upon its tarnished cover, and opening it, began to read in a listless,
absent way. His eyes followed the smooth rhythm of Ronsard's ardent
love-songs and stately sonnets, but his thoughts were wandering far
afield, and he soon threw the book from him with an impatient gesture,
and began slowly unfastening his garments, with the air of a man who is
not sleepy, but only goes to bed because he does not know what else to
do with himself, and has perhaps a faint hope of forgetting his troubles
in the embrace of Morpheus, most blessed of all the gods. The sand runs
so slowly in the hour-glass on a dark, stormy night, in a half-ruined
castle, ten leagues away from any living soul.

The poor young baron, only surviving representative of an ancient and
noble house, had much indeed to make him melancholy and despondent. His
ancestors had worked their own ruin, and that of their descendants,
in various ways. Some by gambling, some in the army, some by undue
prodigality in living--in order that they might shine at court--so that
each generation had left the estate more and more diminished. The fiefs,
the farms, the land surrounding the chateau itself, all had been sold,
one after the other, and the last baron, after desperate efforts to
retrieve the fallen fortunes of the family--efforts which came too late,
for it is useless to try to stop the leaks after the vessel has gone
down--had left his son nothing but this half-ruined chateau and the few
acres of barren land immediately around it. The unfortunate child
had been born and brought up in poverty. His mother had died young,
broken-hearted at the wretched prospects of her only son; so that he
could not even remember her sweet caresses and tender, loving care. His
father had been very stern with him; punishing him severely for the
most trivial offences; yet he would have been glad now even of his sharp