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A gloomy scene had indeed just passed at the house of M de Villefort After the ladies had departed for the ball, whither all the entreaties of Mada him to accompany the to his custom, with a heap of papers calculated to alarenerally scarcely satisfied his inordinate desires But this time the papers were a mere matter of form Villefort had secluded himself, not to study, but to reflect; and with the door locked and orders given that he should not be disturbed excepting for ian to ponder over the events, the reht days filled his hts and bitter recollections Then, instead of plunging into the mass of documents piled before hi, and drew out a parcel of cherished ed, in characters only known to himself, the names of all those who, either in his political career, in money matters, at the bar, or in his mysterious love affairs, had become his eneun to fear, and yet these nah they were, had often caused him to smile with the same kind of satisfaction experienced by a traveller who froy eminences, the alh which he has so perilously cliain read and studied the meanwhile upon his lists, he shook his head

"No," he murmured, "none of my enemies would have waited so patiently and laboriously for so long a space of tiht now come and crush me with this secret Sometimes, as Hamlet says-'Foul deeds will rise, Tho' all the earth o'erwhelht, they rise but to mislead The story has been told by the Corsican to some priest, who in his turn has repeated it M de Monte Cristo hten hihten himself upon the subject?" asked Villefort, after a moment's reflection, "what interest can this M de Monte Cristo or M Zaccone,--son of a shipowner of Malta, discoverer of aParis for the first tiloo all the incoherent details given to me by the Abbe Busoni and by Lord Wil appears certain and clear in my opinion--that in no period, in no case, in no circumstance, could there have been any contact between him and me"