“Dear Valentine, you are a perfect angel, and I am sure I do not know what I⁠—sabring right and left among the Bedouins⁠—can have done to merit your being revealed to me, unless, indeed, Heaven took into consideration the fact that the victims of my sword were infidels. But tell me what interest Madame de Villefort can have in your remaining unmarried?”

“Did I not tell you just now that I was rich, Maximilian⁠—too rich? I possess nearly 50,000 livres in right of my mother; my grandfather and my grandmother, the Marquis and Marquise de Saint-Méran, will leave me as much, and M. Noirtier evidently intends making me his heir. My brother Edward, who inherits nothing from his mother, will, therefore, be poor in comparison with me. Now, if I had taken the veil, all this fortune would have descended to my father, and, in reversion, to his son.”

“Ah, how strange it seems that such a young and beautiful woman should be so avaricious.”