“My father! Even to hear that you had such thoughts of a daughter who never existed, strikes to my heart as if I had been that child.”

“You, Lucie? It is out of the consolation and restoration you have brought to me, that these remembrances arise, and pass between us and the moon on this last night.⁠—What did I say just now?”

“She knew nothing of you. She cared nothing for you.”

“So! But on other moonlight nights, when the sadness and the silence have touched me in a different way⁠—have affected me with something as like a sorrowful sense of peace, as any emotion that had pain for its foundations could⁠—I have imagined her as coming to me in my cell, and leading me out into the freedom beyond the fortress. I have seen her image in the moonlight often, as I now see you; except that I never held her in my arms; it stood between the little grated window and the door. But, you understand that that was not the child I am speaking of?”

“The figure was not; the⁠—the⁠—image; the fancy?”