Meanwhile, as they passed towards the house, Dalibard, still using his native tongue, thus accosted his pupil:-- "You must pardon me if I think more of your interests than you do; and pardon me no less if I encroach on your secrets and alarm your pride.
This young man,--can you be guilty of the folly of more than a passing caprice for his society, of more than the amusement of playing with his vanity?
Even if that be all, beware of entangling yourself in your own meshes." "You do in truth offend me," said Lucretia, with calm haughtiness, "and you have not the right thus to speak to me." "Not the right," repeated the Provencal, mournfully, "not the right! Then, indeed, I am mistaken in my pupil.

Do you consider that I would have lowered my pride to remain here as a dependent; that, conscious of attainments, and perhaps of abilities, that should win their way, even in exile, to distinction, I would have frittered away my life in these rustic shades,--if I had not formed in you a deep and absorbing interest?
In that interest I ground my right to warn and counsel you.

I saw, or fancied I saw, in you a mind congenial to my own; a mind above the frivolities of your sex,--a mind, in short, with the grasp and energy of a man's.

You were then but a child, you are scarcely yet a woman; yet have I not given to your intellect the strong food on which the statesmen of Florence fed their pupil-princes, or the noble Jesuits the noble men who were destined to extend the secret empire of the imperishable Loyola ?" "You gave me the taste for a knowledge rare in my sex, I own," answered Lucretia, with a slight tone of regret in her voice: "and in the knowledge you have communicated I felt a charm that at times seems to me to be only fatal.

You have confounded in my mind evil and good, or rather, you have left both good and evil as dead ashes, as the dust and cinder of a crucible.