"
"It will be more than amusing," said Bellegarde; "it will be inspiring.
I look at it from my point of view, and you from yours. After all,
anything for a change! And only yesterday I was yawning so as to
dislocate my jaw, and declaring that there was nothing new under the
sun! If it isn't new to see you come into the family as a suitor, I am
very much mistaken. Let me say that, my dear fellow; I won't call it
anything else, bad or good; I will simply call it NEW" And overcome with
a sense of the novelty thus foreshadowed, Valentin de Bellegarde threw
himself into a deep arm-chair before the fire, and, with a fixed,
intense smile, seemed to read a vision of it in the flame of the logs.
After a while he looked up. "Go ahead, my boy; you have my good wishes,"
he said. "But it is really a pity you don't understand me, that you
don't know just what I am doing."
"Oh," said Newman, laughing, "don't do anything wrong. Leave me to
myself, rather, or defy me, out and out. I wouldn't lay any load on your
conscience."
Bellegarde sprang up again; he was evidently excited; there was a warmer
spark even than usual in his eye. "You never will understand--you never
will know," he said; "and if you succeed, and I turn out to have helped
you, you will never be grateful, not as I shall deserve you should be.
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