Whether it was a son who would some day avenge his father.
(There was a time in my imprisonment, when my desire for vengeance was unbearable.) Whether it was a son who would never know his father's story; who might even live to weigh the possibility of his father's having disappeared of his own will and act.
Whether it was a daughter who would grow to be a woman."
She drew closer to him, and kissed his cheek and his hand.
"I have pictured my daughter, to myself, as perfectly forgetful of me-rather, altogether ignorant of me, and unconscious of me.
I have cast up the years of her age, year after year.
I have seen her married to a man who knew nothing of my fate.
I have altogether perished from the remembrance of the living, and in the next generation my place was a blank."
"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?"