CHAPTER V.

It was with an interest languid and listless indeed, compared with that
which he would have felt a day before, that Graham mused over the
remarkable advances towards the discovery of Louise Duval which were made
in the letters he had perused. She had married, then, first a foreigner,
whom she spoke of as noble, and whose name and residence could be easily
found through the Countess von Rudesheim. The marriage did not seem to
have been a happy one. Left a widow in reduced circumstances, she
had married again, evidently without affection. She was living so late
as 1861, and she had children living is 1859: was the child referred to
by Richard King one of them?

The tone and style of the letters served to throw some light on the
character of the writer: they evinced pride, stubborn self-will, and
unamiable hardness of nature; but her rejection of all pecuniary aid from
a man like the late Marquis de Rochebriant betokened a certain dignity of
sentiment. She was evidently, whatever her strange ideas about her first
marriage with Richard King, no vulgar woman of gallantry; and there must
have been some sort of charm about her to have excited a friendly
interest in a kinsman so remote, and a man of pleasure so selfish, as her
high-born correspondent.

But what now, so far as concerned his own happiness, was the hope, the
probable certainty, of a speedy fulfilment of the trust bequeathed to
him? Whether the result, in the death of the mother, and more especially
of the child, left him rich, or, if the last survived, reduced his