“What dreadful sufferings!” said Julie, remembering Valentine, but whom, with a delicacy natural to women, she did not name before her brother.

“If the Supreme Being has directed the fatal blow,” said Emmanuel, “it must be that he in his great goodness has perceived nothing in the past lives of these people to merit mitigation of their awful punishment.”

“Do you not form a very rash judgment, Emmanuel?” said Julie. “When my father, with a pistol in his hand, was once on the point of committing suicide, had anyone then said, ‘This man deserves his misery,’ would not that person have been deceived?”

“Yes; but your father was not allowed to fall. A being was commissioned to arrest the fatal hand of death about to descend on him.”