"Dear Valentine, you are a perfect angel, and I am sure I do not know what I--sabring right and left among the Bedouins--can have done to merit your being revealed to me, unless, indeed, heaven took into consideration the fact that the victims of my sword were infidels. But tell me what interest Madame de Villefort can have in your remaining unmarried?"
"Did I not tell you just now that I was rich, Maximilian--too rich? I possess nearly 50,000 livres in right of my mother; my grandfather and my grandmother, the Marquis and Marquise de Saint-Meran, will leave me as much, and M. Noirtier evidently intends making me his heir. My brother Edward, who inherits nothing from his mother, will, therefore, be poor in comparison with me. Now, if I had taken the veil, all this fortune would have descended to my father, and, in reversion, to his son."
"Ah, how strange it seems that such a young and beautiful woman should be so avaricious."
"It is not for herself that she is so, but for her son, and what you regard as a vice becomes almost a virtue when looked at in the light of maternal love."
"But could you not compromise matters, and give up a portion of your fortune to her son?"
"How could I make such a proposition, especially to a woman who always professes to be so entirely disinterested?"
"Valentine, I have always regarded our love in the light of something sacred; consequently, I have covered it with the veil of respect, and hid it in the innermost recesses of my soul. No human being, not even my sister, is aware of its existence. Valentine, will you permit me to make a confidant of a friend and reveal to him the love I bear you?"
Valentine started. "A friend, Maximilian; and who is this friend? I tremble to give my permission."
"Listen, Valentine. Have you never experienced for any one that sudden and irresistible sympathy which made you feel as if the object of it had been your old and familiar friend, though, in reality, it was the first time you had ever met? Nay, further, have you never endeavored to recall the time, place, and circumstances of your former intercourse, and failing in this attempt, have almost believed that your spirits must have held converse with each other in some state of being anterior to the present, and that you are only now occupied in a reminiscence of the past?"
"Yes."
"Well, that is precisely the feeling which I experienced when I first saw that extraordinary man."