Waring!"
"Prettily said, my dear. You have inherited more from your mother than
your good looks alone. Is it not so, mon prince?"
"Much more." Victor's enigmatic smile gave place to a look of regret and
uneasiness. "Let us hope, however, not too much. Heredity," he mused in
sombre mood, "is a force of such fatality in our lives...."
He gave a gesture of solicitude and continued with characteristic
deliberation, and that preciseness of diction which he seemed never able to
forget, even though deeply moved.
"More than ever, now that Sofia is restored to me, I could wish the past
other than what it was, that she might start life with a handicap less
cruel of inherited tendencies. But when I reflect that both her parents--"
"Please!" Sofia begged, piteous. "Oh, please!"
"I am sorry, my dear." Victor closed tender hands over those which the girl
had lifted in appeal. "It is for your own good only I give myself this pain
of warning you against your worst enemy, I mean yourself, the self that is
so strange a compound of hereditary weaknesses.... Please remember always
that, no matter what may happen, however far you may be led into
transgression of the social codes, I shall never reproach you, on the
contrary, you may count implicitly on my sympathetic understanding. Never
forget, I, too, have known, have suffered and fought myself--and in the end
won at a cost I am not yet finished paying, nor will be, I fear, this side
my grave."
He sighed from his heart, and bowing a stricken head, seemed to lose
himself in disconsolate reverie--but not so far as to suffer the
interruption which Sofia made to offer and which he stayed with an eloquent
hand.
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