Evelyn announced her
intention of going, as soon as I should be able to spare her, with a
party of young friends, to hear a celebrated singer perform in an
oratorio in the cathedral of an adjacent city, her specialty being
vocal music, and her mourning permitting only sacred concerts. Her own
highly-cultivated voice, it is true, had ill repaid the care that had
been lavished on it, sharp and thin as it was by nature. I urged her to
set forth at once, declaring myself convalescent, but I did not leave my
room, nor see Claude Bainrothe, save for five minutes in her presence,
until after she had gone. Then I was at liberty to work my will.
I wrote on the very evening of her departure, requesting him to defer
his accustomed visit, until the next morning, when I hoped to have an
hour's private conversation with him in the library, a room most dear to
me, once as the chosen haunt of my father, but shunned of late as
vault-like and melancholy, now that his ever-welcome and dear presence
was removed from it forever.
Punctual as the hand to the hour or the dial to the sun, Claude
Bainrothe came at the time I had appointed, and I was there to meet him,
nerved and calm as a spirit of the past, in that great quiet sarcophagus
of books--at least, I so deceived myself to believe. I had made up my
mind, during the time I had been sitting alone in that sombre room, as
to what I would say to him, and how clearly and concisely I would array
my wrongs in words, and pronounce his sentence.
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