SARA.

Sir William? Ah, Mellefont, you must begin now to accustom yourself to a far more tender name. My father, your father, Mellefont----

MELLEFONT.

Very well, Sara, our kind, our dear father! I was very young when I last used this sweet name; very young, when I had to unlearn the equally sweet name of mother.

SARA.

You had to unlearn it, and I--I was never so happy, as to be able to pronounce it at all. My life was her death! O God, I was a guiltless matricide! And how much was wanting--how little, how almost nothing was wanting to my becoming a parricide too! Not a guiltless, but a voluntary parricide. And who knows, whether I am not so already? The years, the days, the moments by which he is nearer to his end than he would have been without the grief I have caused him--of those I have robbed him. However old and weary he may be when Fate shall permit him to depart, my conscience will yet be unable to escape the reproach that but for me he might have lived yet longer. A sad reproach with which I doubtless should not need to charge myself, if a loving mother had guided me in my youth. Through her teaching and her example my heart would--you look tenderly on me, Mellefont? You are right; a mother would perhaps have been a tyrant for very love, and I should not now belong to Mellefont. Why do I wish then for that, which a wiser Fate denied me out of kindness? Its dispensations are always best. Let us only make proper use of that which it gives us; a father who never yet let me sigh for a mother; a father who will also teach you to forget the parents you lost so soon. What a flattering thought. I fall in love with it, and forget almost, that in my innermost heart there is still something which refuses to put faith in it. What is this rebellious someth