broken?"

"Father! father! I am so wretched and so ashamed of myself for being
wretched! Forgive me. No, I do not forget your promise; but who can
promise to dispose of the heart of another? and that heart will never be
mine. But bear with me a little, I shall soon recover."

"Valerie, when I made you the promise you now think I cannot keep, I
spoke only from that conviction of power to promote the happiness of a
child which nature implants in the heart of parents; and it may be also
from the experience of my own strength of will, since that which I have
willed I have always won. Now I speak on yet surer ground. Before the
year is out you shall be the beloved wife of Alain de Rochebriant. Dry
your tears and smile on me, Valerie. If you will not see in me mother
and father both, I have double love for you, motherless child of her who
shared the poverty of my youth, and did not live to enjoy the wealth
which I hold as a trust for that heir to mine all which she left me."

As this man thus spoke you would scarcely have recognized in him the old
saturnine Duplessis, his countenance became so beautified by the one soft
feeling which care and contest, ambition and money-seeking, had left
unaltered in his heart. Perhaps there is no country in which the love of
parent and child, especially of father and daughter, is so strong as it
is in France; even in the most arid soil, among the avaricious, even
among the profligate, it forces itself into flower. Other loves fade
away: in the heart of the true Frenchman that parent love blooms to the
last. Valerie felt the presence of that love as a divine protecting
guardianship. She sank on her knees and covered his hand with grateful
kisses.