Page:The great Galeoto; Folly or saintliness; two plays done from the verse of José Echegaray into English prose by Hannah Lynch (IA greatgaleotofoll00echerich).djvu/176

 wishes to perform a sublime action which, if he carries out the prospect, will immortalise him in tale and history, and, who knows, may even lift him aloft into the Calendar?

. I see you appreciate the humour of the situation, and that is no bad sign.

. I want to show you how perfectly cool I am. As for Don Lorenzo, we must regard the affair as a joke, or put him into an asylum.

. Don't say such things, Edward. It offends me to hear you speak so. There may be some slight exaggeration, perhaps no inconsiderable precipitation, and a certain air of melodramatic display in Don Lorenzo's project, but we cannot deny that he is acting like a gentleman.

. Why does he revel in his daughter's misfortune?

. Because he is accomplishing his duty without respect of human passions.

. Then if Don Lorenzo is so honourable, and the lustre of noble actions is a heritage, Inés will be something more than the angel of my life—she will bring me a wealth of hereditary virtue.

. She will also bring more than her share of hereditary dishonour. [In low voice approaching him.] The girl has no name good or bad, since nobody knows what her father's is, and that of her grandmother has been inscribed as a thief's upon the infamous register of a prison.

. Hush!

. If we are to believe Don Lorenzo, that unhappy girl's fate is to be a humble nurse's grandchild, and her father's accomplice in living under a false name. It would perhaps be an excess of aristocratic pride to reject such an honourable alliance, but to such a decision 136