“Free to leave me.”

“Leave you? Why should I leave you?”

“That is not for me to say; but we are now about to mix in society⁠—to visit and be visited.”

“I don’t wish to see anybody but you.”

“And should you see one whom you could prefer, I would not be so unjust⁠—”

“I have never seen anyone I preferred to you, and I have never loved anyone but you and my father.”

“My poor child,” replied Monte Cristo, “that is merely because your father and myself are the only men who have ever talked to you.”

“I don’t want anybody else to talk to me. My father said I was his ‘joy’⁠—you style me your ‘love,’⁠—and both of you have called me ‘my child.’ ”

“Do you remember your father, Haydée?”