Plunged in a deep armchair, hands drooping and feet on the
fender, he was sunk in sombre revery. An open book lay near him,
and a letter was flung, furiously crumpled, on the floor.

An orphan at the age of twelve, Felix had watched his mother's
slow death through ten years of suffering. The Marquis Gratien
d'Aubremel, ruined by reckless dissipation, and driven by
necessity, rather than love, into a marriage with an English
heiress, Margaret Malden, deserted her, like the wretch he was,
as soon as the last of her dowry melted away. A common story
enough, and ending in as common a close. D'Aubremel sailed for
the Indies to retrieve his fortune, and met death there by yellow
fever. So that the sad lessons of Felix's family life stimulated
to excess his innate leaning towards misanthropy--if that name
may define a resistless urgency of belief in the appearances of
evil, linked with a doubt of the reality of good. Probably, at
heart, he believed himself incapable of a bad action, but he
would take no oath to such a conviction, since by his theory
every man must yield under certain circumstances, attacking
powerfully his personal interest, while threatening slight danger
of failure or detection. This style of thought, set off by a fair
share of witty expression and ever-ready impertinence, gave Felix
a kind of ascendancy in his circle of intimates--but naturally
it gained him no friends. Common reputation grows out of words
rather than actions, and Felix suffered the just penalty of his
sceptical fancies. They cost him more than they were worth, as he
had just learned by sad experience.

He had chanced to make the acquaintance of a rich manufacturer,
Montmorot by name, whose daughter Ernestine was pleased with