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CHAPTER XXVIII.
"Oh, man! hold thee on in courage of soul,
Through the stormy shades of thy worldly way."
Shelley.
It was a small and gloomy-looking apartment in one of the retired streets of Paris, where all was as quiet as if it had not been in the centre of that busy metropolis. Only a distant and incessant murmur, like the rolling of the sea against the resounding shore, told that life was pouring the perpetual tumult of its restless waves around. The contrast was oppressive, for the stillness of the place itself was that of inaction, not of repose. Like one excluded from the general struggle, not like one retired from it, a young cavalier was the sole tenant of that lonely chamber, and for the last half-hour he had sat in a desponding reverie, watching the blaze of his wood-fire gradually dying away on the hearth—his sole employment, meditating over a past whose every recollection
