The being whose one claim had lain in her
incorrigible lightness, came to seem representative of the suffering
of the whole world in its plenitude of piteous detail, in those
unvalued caresses, that desire towards himself, that patient half-
expressed claim not to be wholly despised, poignant now for ever.
For he failed to find her: and her brothers being presumably dead,
all he could discover of a certainty from the last survivor of her
more distant kinsmen was the fact of her flight into the country,
already in labour it was thought, and in the belief that she had been
treacherously deserted, like many another at that great crisis. In
the one place in the neighbourhood of Paris with which his knowledge
connected her he seeks further tidings, but hears only of her passing
through it, as of a passage into vague infinite space; a little
onward, dimly of her death, with the most damaging view of his own
conduct presented with all the condemnatory resources of Huguenot
tongues, but neither of the place nor the circumstances of that
event, nor whether, as seemed hardly probable, the child survived.
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