She did not even quiver, but was as calm as if she had long awaited this question.

She boldly met Jose's glance and said:

"Does one ask such a question of the woman one loves?"

"Suppose that I ask this question of the Duchesse de Rosas!" said the Spaniard, with quivering lip.

She became as pale as he.

"I do not understand—" she said.

The duke remained silent for a moment; then his entire soul passed into his voice:

"I have no family, Marianne. I am entirely my own master, and I love you. If you swear to me that you have not been Guy's mistress—"

"Nobody has the right to say that he has even touched my lips," replied Marianne firmly. "Only one man, he who took me, an innocent girl, and left me heart-broken, disgusted, believing I should never again love, before I met you. He is dead."

"I know," said Rosas, "you confided that to me formerly.—A widow save in name, I offer you, yes, I! my name, my love, my whole life—will you take them?"

"Eh! you know perfectly well that I love you!" she exclaimed, as she frantically gave him the burning and penetrating kiss that had never left his lips since the soiree at Sabine's.

"Then, no one—no one?" Jose repeated.

"No one!"

"On honor?"

"On honor!"

"Oh! how I love you!" he said, distractedly, all his passion shattering his coldness of manner, as the sun melts the snow. "If you but knew how jealous and crazed I am about you!—I desire you, I adore you, and I condemn myself to remain glacial before you, beneath your glance that fires my blood—I love you, and the recollection of Guy hindered me from telling you that all that is mine belongs to you—I am a ferocious creature, you know, capable of mad outbursts, senseless anger, and unreasoning flight—Yes, I have wished to escape from you again. Well! no, I remain with you; I love you, I love you!—You shall be my wife, do you hear? My wife!—Ah! what a moment of bliss! I have loved you for years! Have you not seen it, Marianne?"

"I have seen it and I loved you! I also have kept silence! I saw plainly that you believed that I had given myself to another—No, no, I am yours, nothing but yours! All my love, all myself, take it; I have kept it for you; for I hate the past, more than that, I do not know that it exists—It is despised, obliterated, it is nothing! But you, ah! you, you are my life!"

She left Jose's, her youth renewed, haughty, intoxicated with delight. She walked along alone, in the paths of the Champs-Elysees, the rusty leaves falling in showers at the breath of the already cold wind, her heels ringing on the damp asphalt. She marched straight ahead, her thoughts afire from her intoxicating emotions. It seemed that Paris belonged to her.

That evening, she was to go to the theatre. It was arranged that Vaudrey should wait for her at the entrance with a hired carriage and take her to Rue Prony. She wrote to him that she could not leave the house. A slight headache. Uncle Kayser undertook to have the letter taken by a commissionaire.

"Unless you would rather have me go to the ministry!"

"Are you mad?" Marianne said.

"That is true, it would be immoral."

She wished to have the evening to herself, quite alone, so that she could let her dreams take flight.

Dreams? Nonsense! On the contrary, it was a dazzling reality: a fortune, a title, a positive escape from want and the mire. What a revenge!

"It is enough to drive one mad!"

Sudden fears seized her; the terror of the too successful gambler. What if everything crumbled like a house of cards! She wished that she were several weeks older.

"Time passes so quickly, and yet one has a desire to spur it on."

Now in the solitude of her house she felt weary. She could neither read nor think, and became feverish. She regretted that she had written to Vaudrey. She wished to go to the theatre. A new operetta would be a diversion, and why should she not go? She had the ticket for her box. She could at once inform Vaudrey that her headache had vanished.

"And then he bores me!—Especially now."

Matters, however, must not be abruptly changed. Suppose Rosas should take a sudden fancy to fly off again! Besides, she had mutual interests with the minister, there was an account to be settled.

"The Gochard paper?—Bah! he will pay it. More-ever, I am not involved in that."

Suddenly she thought that she would act foolishly if she did not go where she pleased. Sulpice might think what he pleased. She got her maid to dress her hair.

"Madame is going to the theatre?"

"Yes, Justine. To the Renaissance!"

She was greatly amused at the theatre, and was radiant with pleasure. She was the object of many glances, and felt delighted at being alone. One of the characters in the operetta was a duchess whose adventures afforded the audience much diversion. She abandoned herself to her dreams, her thoughts wandering far from the theatre, the footlights and the actors, to the distant orange groves yonder.

During an entr'acte some one knocked at the door of her box. She turned around in surprise. It was Jouvenet, the Prefect of Police, who came to greet her in a very gallant fashion. The prefect—he had gained at the palais in former days, the title of L'Avocat Pathelin,—with insinuating and wheedling manners, hastened to pay his meed of respect to Marianne when he met her. There was no necessity to stand on ceremony with him. He knew all her secrets. Such a man, more-ever, must be treated prudently, as he can make himself useful. Never had Jouvenet spoken to her of Vaudrey, he was too politic in matters of state. But as a man who knows that everything in this world is transient, he skilfully maintained his place in the ranks, considering that a Prefect of Police might not be at all unlikely to succeed a President of the Council.

Marianne permitted him to talk, accepted all his gallantries as she might have done bonbons, and with a woman's wit kept him at a distance without wounding his vanity.

Jouvenet with the simple purpose of showing her that he was well-informed, asked her, stroking his whiskers as he did so, if she often saw the Duc de Rosas. What a charming man the duke was! And while the young woman watched him as if to guess his thoughts, he smiled at her.

The prefect, not wishing to appear too persistent, changed the conversation with the remark:

"Ah! there is one of our old friends ogling you!"

"An old friend?"

It was in fact Guy de Lissac who was standing at the balcony training his glass upon the box.

Marianne had only very occasionally met Lissac, but for some time she had suspected him of being secretly hostile to her. Guy bore her a grudge for having taken Sulpice away from Adrienne. He pitied Madame Vaudrey and perhaps his deep compassion was blended with another sentiment in which tenderness had taken the place of a more modified interest. He was irritated against the blind husband because he could not see the perfect charms of that delicate soul, so timid and at the same time so devoted. Although he had not felt justified in showing his annoyance to Vaudrey, he had manifested his dislike to Marianne under cover of his jesting manner, and she had been exceedingly piqued thereby. Wherefore did this man who could not understand her, interfere, and why did he add to the injuries of old the mockery of to-day?

"After all, perhaps it is through jealousy," she thought. "The dolt!"

Guy did not cease to look at her through his glass.

"Does that displease you?" Jouvenet asked.

"Not at all. What is that to me?"

"This Lissac was much in love with you!"

"Ah! Monsieur le Prefet!" Marianne observed sharply. "I know that your office inclines you to be somewhat inquisitive, but it would be polite of you to allow my past to sleep in your dockets. They are famous shrouds!"

Jouvenet bit his lips and in turn brought his glass to bear on Lissac.

"See," he said, "he makes a great deal of the cross of the Christ of Portugal! It is in very bad taste! I thought he was a shrewder man!"

"The order of Christ is then in bad odor?"

"On the contrary; but as it is like the Legion of Honor in color, he is prohibited from wearing it in his buttonhole without displaying the small gold cross—And I see only the red there—"

"I beg your pardon, Monsieur le Prefet, there is one."

"Oh! my glass is a wretched one!—But even so, I do not believe Monsieur de Lissac is authorized by the Grand Chancellor to wear his decoration. That is easily ascertained!—I will nevertheless not fail to insert in the Officiel to-morrow a note relative to the illegality of wearing certain foreign decorations—"

"Is this note directed against Lissac?"

"Not at all. But he reminds me of a step that I have wished to take for a long time: the enforcement of the law."

The entr'acte was over. Jouvenet withdrew, repeating all kinds of remarks with double meanings that veiled declarations of love; that if the occasion arose, he would place himself entirely at her service, and that some day she might be very glad to meet him—

"I thank you, Monsieur le Prefet, and I will avail myself of your kindness," replied Marianne, out of courtesy.

Something suggested to her that Guy would pay his respects to her during the next entr'acte, were it only to jest about Jouvenet's visit, seeing that he was regarded as a compromising acquaintance, and she was not wrong.

Behind his monocle, his keen, mocking glance seemed like a taunting smile.

"Well," he said, in a somewhat abrupt tone, as he sat near Marianne, "I congratulate you, my dear friend."

"Why?" she answered with surprise.

"On the great news, parbleu! Your marriage."

She turned slightly pale.

"How do you know?—"

"I have seen the duke. He called on me."

"On you? What for?"

"Can't you make a little guess—a very little guess—"

"To ask you if I had been your mistress? Lissac, you are very silly."

"Yes, my dear Marianne, prepare yourself somewhat for the position of a duchess. A gentleman, to whom you have sworn that I have never been your lover, could not doubt your word!—Jose asked me nothing. He simply stated his determination to see what I would say, or gather from my looks what I thought of it."

"And you said?"

"What I had to say to him: I congratulated him!"

Marianne raised her gray eyes to Lissac's face.

"Congratulate?" she said slowly.

"The woman he marries is pretty enough, I think?"

"Ah! my dear, a truce to insolent trifles!—what is it that has possessed you for some time past?"

"Nothing, but something has possessed you—or some one."

"Rosas?"

"No, Vaudrey!"

"I will restore him to you. Oh! oh! you are surprisingly interested in Vaudrey. Vaudrey or his wife?" she remarked.

She smiled with her wicked expression.

"Duchess," said Lissac, "accustom yourself to respect virtuous women!"

"Is it to talk of such pleasant trifles that you have gained access to my box?"

"No, it is to ask you for some special information."

"What?"

"Is it true, is it really true that you are about to wed Rosas?" he asked in an almost cordial tone.

"Why not?" she replied, as she raised her head.

"Because—I am going to be frank—I have always regarded you as an absolutely straightforward woman, a woman of honor—You once claimed so to be. Mad, fantastic, you often are; charming, always; but dishonest, never. To take Rosas's love, even his fortune, would be natural enough, but to take his name would be a very questionable act and a skilful one, but lacking in frankness."

"That is to say that I may devour him like a courtesan, but not marry him as a—"

"As a young girl, no, you cannot do that. And you put me—I am bound to tell you so and I take advantage of the intermission to do so—in a delicate position. If I declared the truth to Rosas, I act toward you as a rascal. If I keep silent to my friend, my true friend, I act almost like a knave."

"Did Rosas ask you to speak to me?"

"No, but there is a voice within me that pricks me to speech and tells me that if I allow you to marry the duke, I am committing myself to a questionable affair—Do you know what he asked me?—To be his witness."

If Marianne had been in a laughing mood, she would have laughed heartily.

"It is absurd," she said. "You did not consent?"

"Yes, indeed, I have consented. Because I really hoped that you would relieve me from such an undesirable duty, a little too questionable."

"You would like?—What would you like?"

"I wish—no, I would have you not marry Monsieur de Rosas."

Marianne shrugged her shoulders.

She clearly felt the threat conveyed in Lissac's words, but she desired to show from the first that she disdained them. What right, after all, had this casual acquaintance to mix himself up in her life affairs? Because, one day, she had been charitable enough to give him her youth and her body! The duty of friendship! The rights of friendship! To protect Vaudrey! To defend Rosas! Words, tiresome words!

"And what if I wish to marry him, myself?—Would you prevent it?"

"Yes, if I could!" he said firmly. "It is time that to the freemasonry of women we should oppose the freemasonry of men."

"You are cruelly cowardly enough when you are alone, what would you be then when you are together?" said Marianne, with a malignant expression. "In fact," said she, after a moment's pause, "what would you have? What? Decide!—Will you send my letters to the duke?"

"That is one way," said Lissac, calmly. "It is a woman's way, that!"

"You have my letters still?"

"Preciously preserved."

He had not contemplated such a threat, but she quickly scented a danger therein.

"Suppose I should ask the return of those letters, perhaps you would restore them to me?"

"Probably," he said.

"Suppose I asked you to bring them to me, you know, in that little out of the way room of which I spoke to you one day?"

She had leaned gently toward Lissac and her elbows grazed the knees of her former lover.

"I would wear, that day, one of those otter-trimmed toques that you have not forgotten."

She saw that he trembled, as if he were moved by some unsatisfied desire for her. She felt reassured.

"Nonsense!" she said with a smiling face. "You are not so bad as you pretend to be."

The manager tapped the customary three blows behind the curtain, and the orchestra began the prelude to the third act.

"Adieu for a brief period, my enemy!" said Marianne, extending her hand.

He hesitated to take that hand. At length, taking it in his own, he said:

"Leave me Rosas!"

"Fie! jealous one! Don't I leave Vaudrey to you?"

She laughed, while Lissac went away dissatisfied.

"I will have my letters, at all risks," thought Marianne when he had disappeared. "It is more prudent."

That night she slept badly, and the following morning rose in a very ill-humor. Her face expressed fatigue, her eyes were encircled with dark rings and burned feverishly, but withal, her beauty was heightened. All the morning she debated as to the course she should take, and finally decided to write to Guy, when Sulpice Vaudrey arrived, and beaming with delight, informed Marianne that he had the entire day to spend with her.

"I learned through Jouvenet this morning that you were able to go to the theatre. Naughty one, to steal an evening from me. But I have all to-day, at least."

And he sat down in the salon like a man spreading himself out in his own house. Marianne was meditating some scheme to get rid of him when the chamber-maid entered, presenting a note on a tray.

"What is that?"

"A messenger, madame, has brought this letter."

Marianne read the paper hurriedly.

Vaudrey observed that she blushed slightly.

"Is the messenger still there, Justine?"

"No, madame, he is gone. He said that there was no reply."

Marianne quickly tore in small pieces the note she had just read.

"Some annoyance?" asked Vaudrey.

"Yes, exactly."

"May I know?"

"No, it does not interest you. A family affair."

"Ah! your uncle?" asked Vaudrey, smiling.

"My uncle, yes!"

"He has asked that he be permitted to exhibit at the Trocadero the cartoons that he has finished: The Artist's Mission, Hydropathy the Civilizer, I don't know what in fact, a series of symbolical compositions—"

"With the mirliton device underneath?—Yes, I know," said Marianne.

She snapped her fingers in her impatience.

The letter that she had torn up had been written by Rosas, and received by Uncle Kayser at his studio, whence he had forwarded it to his niece. The duke informed Marianne that he would wait for her at five o'clock at Avenue Montaigne. He had something to say to her. He had passed the entire night reflecting and dreaming. She remembered her own wild dreams. Had Rosas then caught her thought floating like an atom on the night wind?

At five o'clock! She would be punctual. But how escape Vaudrey? She could not now feign sickness since she had received him! Moreover, he would instal himself near her and bombard her with his attentions. Was there any possible pretext, any way of getting out now? Her lover had the devoted, radiant look of a loved man who relied on enjoying a long interview with his mistress. He looked at her with a tender glance.

"The fool—The sticker!" thought Marianne. "He will not leave!"

The best course was to go out. She would lose him on the way.

"What time have you, my dear minister?"

"One o'clock!"

"Then I have time!" she said.

Vaudrey seemed surprised. Marianne unceremoniously informed him, in fact, that she had some calls to make, to secure some purchases.

"How disagreeable!"

"Yes, for me!"

"I beg your pardon," said Sulpice, correcting himself.

She sent for a coupe and damp and keen as the weather was, she substituted for the glorious day of snug, intimate joy that Vaudrey had promised himself, a succession of weary hours passed in the draught caused by badly-fitting windows, while making a series of trips hither and thither, Marianne meantime cudgelling her brains to find a way to leave her lover on the way, or at least to notify Rosas.

But above all to notify Lissac! It was Lissac whom she was determined to see. Yes, absolutely, and at once. The more she considered the matter, the more dangerous it appeared to her.

Sulpice had not given her a moment of freedom at her house, in which to write a few lines. He might have questioned her and that would be imprudent.

"I wish, however, to tell Guy to expect me!—Where? Rue Cuvier? He would not go there!—No, at his house!"

On the way she found the means.

Vaudrey evidently was at liberty for the day and, master of his time, he would not leave her. This he repeated at every turn of the wheel. She ordered the driver to take her to The Louvre.

"I have purchases to make!"

Sulpice could not accompany her, so he waited for her at the entrance on Place du Palais-Royal, nestled in a corner of the carriage, the blinds of which were lowered in order that he might not be seen. He felt very cold.

Marianne slowly crossed between the stalls on the ground floor, hardly looking at the counters bearing the Japanese goods, the gloves and the artificial flowers. She ascended a winding iron stairway draped with tapestries, her tiny feet sinking into the moquette that covered the steps, and entered a noiseless salon where men and women were silently sitting before three tables, writing or reading, just as in the drawing-room of a hotel. At a large round table, old ladies and young girls sat looking at the pictures in Illustration, the caricatures in the Journal Amusant, and the sketches in La Vie Parisienne. Others, at the second table, were reading the daily papers, some of which were rolled about their holders like a flag around its staff, or the Revue des Deux Mondes. Further on, at a red-covered table furnished with leather-bound blotters and round, glass inkstands in which the ink danced with a purple reflection, people were writing, seated on chairs covered in worn, garnet-colored velvet, with mahogany frames. This gloomy apartment was brightened by broad-leaved green plants, and was lighted from the roof by means of a flat skylight.

Marianne walked direct to the table on which the paper was symmetrically arranged in a stationery rack, and quickly seating herself, she laid her muff down, half-raised her little veil, and beat a tattoo with her tiny hand on the little black leather blotter before her, then taking off her gloves, she took at random some sheets of paper and some envelopes bearing the address of the establishment on the corners. As she looked around for a pen, Marianne could not refrain from smiling, she thought of that poor Sulpice down there, waiting in the carriage and probably shivering in the draughts issuing from the disjointed doors. And he a minister!

"Such is adultery in Paris!" she said to herself, happy to make him suffer.

She did not hurry. She was amused by her surroundings. A uniformed man promenaded the salon, watching the stationery in the cases and replacing it as it was used. If required, he sold stamps to any one present. A letter-box was attached near the tall chimney, bearing the hours of collection.

Beside Marianne, elbow to elbow, and before her, were principally women, some writing with feverish haste, others hesitatingly, and amongst them were two girls opposite her, who as they finished their letters chuckled in a low tone and passed them one to the other, say-to each other, as they chewed their plaid penholders:

"It is somewhat cold, eh! He will say: Eh, well, it is true then!"

The two pretty, cheerful girls before her were doubtless breaking in this way some liaison, amusing themselves by sending an unexpected blow to some poor fellow, and enjoying themselves by spoiling paper; the one writing, the other reading over her companion's shoulder and giving vent to merry laughter under her Hungarian toque, a huge Quaker-collar almost covering her shoulders and her little jacket with its large steel buttons.

This feminine head-gear made Marianne think of Guy. Her eyes, catlike in expression, gleamed maliciously.

She took some paper and essayed to frame some tempting, tender phrases, something nebulous and exciting, but she could not.

"What I would like to write him is that he is a wretch and that I hate him!" she thought.

Then she stopped and looked about her, altogether forgetting Vaudrey.

The contrast between that silent reading-room and the many-colored crowd in that Oriental bazaar, whose murmurs reached her ears like the roaring of a distant sea, and of which she could see only the corner clearly defined by the framework of the doors, amused Marianne, who with a smile on her lips, enjoyed the mischievous delight of fooling a President of the Council.

"At least that avenges me for the cowardice that the other forced me to commit!"

Then mechanically regarding the crowd that flowed through these docks, that contained everything that could please or disgust a whole world at once, the crowd, the clerks, the carpets, the linen, the crowding, the heaping,—all seemed strange and comic to her, novel and not Parisian, but American and up-to-date.

"Oh! decidedly up-to-date!—And so convenient!" she said, as she heard the young girls laugh when they finished their love-letters.

Then she began to write, having surely found the expressions she sought. She sent Rosas a letter of apology: she would be at his house to-morrow at the same hour. To-day, her uncle took up her day, compelling her to go to see his paintings, to visit the Louvre, to buy draperies for an Oriental scene that he intended to paint. If Rosas did not receive the letter in time, it mattered little! To Lissac,—and this was the main consideration,—she intimated that she would call on him the next morning at ten o'clock.

"Rendezvous box!" she said, as she slipped her two letters into the letter-box. "This extreme comfort is very ironical."

She smiled as she thought how long it would take to count the number of the little hands, some trembling, some bold, that had slipped into the rectilinear mouth of the letter-box some little missive that was either the foretaste or the postscript of adultery.

Then she went downstairs and rejoined Vaudrey, who was impatiently tapping the floor of the carriage with his foot.

"I was a long time there, I ask your pardon," said Marianne.

"At any rate, I hope you have bought something that suited you?" asked Vaudrey, who seemed to have caught a cold.

"Nothing at all. There is nothing in that store!"

Vaudrey was alarmed. Were they to visit one after the other all the fancy goods stores?

Marianne took pity on him.

"Let us return, shall we?" she asked.

She called to the coachman: "Rue Prony!" while Sulpice, whom she unwillingly took with her, though he wearily yawned, seized her hand and said as he sneezed:

"Ah! how kind you are!"

The next day, Marianne rang the bell of Lissac's house in Rue d'Aumale, a little before the appointed hour.

"Punctual as a creditor!" she thought.

She reached Guy's, ready for anything. She was very pale and charming in her light costume, and she entered as one would go into a fray with head high. She would not leave the place until she had recovered her letters.

It was only for those scraps of paper that she again, as it were, bound and tied herself to her past; she wished to cut herself away from it and to tear them to pieces with her teeth. But what if Guy should refuse to give them up to her? That could not be possible, although he was sincerely attached to Rosas. Still, between gratitude to a woman and duty to a friend, a man might hesitate, when he is a corrupted Parisian like Lissac.

"His affection for Jose will not carry him to the length of forgetting all that I have given him of myself!" Marianne thought.

Then shrugging her shoulders:

"After all, these men have such a freemasonry between them, as he said!—And they speak of our fraternity, we women!—It is nothing compared with theirs!"

Guy did not show any displeasure on hearing Mademoiselle Kayser announced. He was waiting for her. As Marianne could not feel free so long as he held the proof of her imprudence, some day or other she must inevitably seek him to supplicate or threaten him. The letter received overnight had apprised him that that moment had arrived.

He had just finished dressing when she entered. His suede gloves were laid out flat on a little table beside his hat, his stick and a small antique cloisonne vase into which were thrown the many-colored rosettes of his foreign decorations, some of them red, amid which a little gold cross glistened like some brilliant beetle settled on a deep-hued rose.

"I wager that you are going out!" Marianne remarked abruptly. "Clearly, you did not expect me!—Haven't you received my letter?"

"My dear Marianne," he replied, as he slowly finished adjusting the knot of his cravat, "that is the very remark you made when you condescended to reappear at my house after a lapse of some years. You have too modest a way of announcing yourself; I assure you that, for my part, I always expect you—and that with impatience. But to-day, more than on any other occasion, because of your charming note."

She knew Guy well enough to perceive that his exquisite politeness only concealed a warlike irony. She did not reply, but stood smiling in front of the fireplace and warmed her toes at the light flames that leapt about the logs.

"You are exceedingly polite," she said at last. "On honor, I like you very much—you laugh? I say very much—Yes, in spite—In no case, have you had aught to complain of me."

She half turned, resting her left hand on the edge of the velvet-covered mantel, and cast a furtive, gentle glance at Lissac that recalled a multitude of happy incidents.

"I have never complained," said the young man, "and I have frequently expressed my thanks!"

Marianne laughed at the discreet manner so ceremoniously adopted by Lissac.

"You are silly, come!—We have a great liking for each other, and it is in the name of that affection that I come to ask a service."

"You have only to speak, my dear Marianne," Lissac answered, as if he had not noticed the intimacy her words expressed.

He affected a cold politeness; Marianne replied to him with apparent renewed tenderness. She looked at him for some time as if she hesitated and feared, her glance penetrating Lissac's, and begging with a tearful petition that wished to kindle a flame in his eyes.

"What I have to say to you will take some time. I am afraid—"

"Of what?" he asked.

"I don't know. You are in a hurry? I interfere with you, perhaps!"

"Not the least in the world. I breakfast at the Club, take a turn in the Bois, and drop in at the Mirlitons to see the opening. You see that I should be entitled to very little merit in sacrificing to you a perfectly wasted day."

"Is the present Exposition of the Mirlitons well spoken of?" asked Marianne, indifferently.

"Very. It is a collection of things that are to be sold for the benefit of a deceased artist. Would you like to go there at four o'clock?"

"No, thanks!—And I repeat, my dear Guy, that I will not hinder you, you know, if I have been indiscreet in giving you an appointment!—"

She seemed to be mechanically toying with the silk rosettes in the little vase; she picked them up and let them drop from her fingers like grains.

"These are yours?" she asked.—"Come near that I may put them on!"

She went to Guy, smilingly, and resting her body against his for its entire length, she paused for a moment while she held the lapel of his jacket, and from head to foot she gazed at him with a look that seemed to impregnate him with odor and turned him pale.

"What an idea, Marianne! I do not wear these ribbons now."

"A childish one. I remember that I was the first to place in this buttonhole some foreign decoration that Monsieur de Rosas brought you—"

She pronounced this name boldly, as if she would bring on the battle.

"That suits you well," she continued. "Orders on your coat are like diamonds in our ears—they are of no use, but they are pretty."

She had passed a red rosette through the buttonhole, and lowering his head, Guy saw her fair brow, her blond locks within reach of his lips. They exhaled a perfume—the odor of hay, that he liked so well—and those woman's fingers on his breast, the fingers of the woman whom he had mocked the previous night at the theatre, caused him a disturbing sensation. He gently disengaged himself, while Marianne repeated: "That suits you well—" Then her hand fell on his and she pressed his fingers in her burning and soft palm and said, as she half lowered her head toward him:

"Do you know why I have come? You know that I am silly. Well, naughty one, the other evening in that box when you punished me with your irony, all my love for you returned!—Ah! how foolish we are, we women! Tell me, Guy, do you recall the glorious days we have spent? Those recollections retain their place in the heart! Has the idea of living again as in the past never occurred to you? It was so sweet!"

Lissac laughed a little nervously and trembled slightly, trying to joke but feeling himself suddenly weakening in the presence of this woman whose wrath or contemptuous smile he preferred.

He recognized all the vanished perfumes. The sensation of trembling delight that years had borne away now returned to him. The silent pressure of the hands recalled nights of distraction. He half shut his eyes, a sudden madness overcame him, although he was sufficiently calm to say to himself that she had an end in view, this woman's coming to him, loveless, to speak of love to him, herself unmoved by the senses, to awaken vanished feelings, to offer herself with the irresistible skill of desire: a dead passion born of caprice.

"Nevertheless, it is you who left me, satiated after taking from me all that you were capable of loving," she said. "Do you know one thing, however, Guy? There is more than one woman in a woman. There are as many as she possesses of passions or joys, and the Marianne of to-day is so different from the one who was your mistress formerly!—You would never leave me, if you were my lover now!"

She tempted this man whose curiosity was aroused, accustomed as he was to casual and easy love adventures. He foresaw danger, but there within reach of his lips were experienced kisses, an ardent supplicant, a proffered delight, full of burning promise. In a sort of anger, he seized the woman who recalled all the past joys, uttered the well-known cries, and who suddenly, as in a nervous attack, deliriously plucked the covering from her bosom, and bared with the boldness of beauty that knows itself to be irresistible, her white arms, her brilliant, untrammeled breasts, the sparkling splendor of her flesh, with her golden hair unfastened, as she used to appear lying on a pillow of fair silk, almost faint and between her kisses, that were as fierce as bites, uttering: "I love you—you—I adore you—" And the lovely, imperious girl again became, almost without a word having been exchanged, the submissive woman carried away by lascivious ardor; and Guy, confused and speechless, no longer reasoning, was unable to say whether Marianne belonged to him, or he to the mistress of former days, become the mistress of to-day.

He held her clasped to him, his hand raising her pale, languishing face about which her fair hair fell loosely; to him she looked like one asleep, her pink nostrils still dilating with a spasmodic movement, and it seemed to him that he had just suffered from the perturbing contact of a courtesan in the depths of some luxurious den.

It was an immediate reawakening, enervating but furious. She had given herself impulsively. He recovered himself similarly. The sudden contact of two bodies resulted in the immediate recoil of two beings.

With more bitter shame, he had had similar morose awakenings after a dissipated night, his heart, his brave heart thumping against the passionate form, often lean and sallow, of some satiated girl, fearfully weary.

What cowardice! Was it Vaudrey's mistress or the future wife of Rosas who had clung to his lips?

He felt disgusted at heart.

Yet she was adorable, this still young and lovely Marianne.

With cruel perspicacity, he already foresaw that he would be guilty of cowardly conduct in yielding to this sudden weakness, and ashamed of himself he disengaged himself from her hysterical embrace, while Marianne squatted on his bed, throwing back her hair from her face, still smiling as she looked at him and asked:

"Well—what? What is the matter with you, then?"

She rose slowly, slipping upon the carpet while he went to the window to look mechanically into the yard. Between these two creatures but a moment before clasped together, a sudden icy coldness sprung up as if each had divined that the hour was about to sound, terrible as a knell, when their affairs must be settled. The kisses of love are to be paid for.

Standing before the mirror, half undressed, Marianne was arranging her hair. Her white shoulders, her still heaving and oppressed bosom were still exposed within the border of her fine chemisette. She felt her wrists, instinctively examining her bracelets, and looked toward the bed in an absent sort of way as if to see if some charm had not slipped from them.

"Guy," she said abruptly, but in a tone which she tried to make endearing, "promise me that you will not refuse what I am about to ask you."

"I promise."

They now quite naturally substituted for the "thou" of affectionate address, the more formal "you," secretly realizing that after the intertwining of their bodies, their real individualities independent of all surprises or sensual appetite, would find themselves face to face.

"I could wish that our affection—and it is profound, is it not, Guy?—dated only from the moment that we have just passed."

"I do not regret the past," he said.

"Nor I! Yet I would like to efface it—yes, by a single stroke!"

She held between her white fingers some rebellious little locks of hair that had come out, which she had rolled and twisted, and casting them into the clear flame, she said:

"See! to burn it like that!—Pft!—"

"Burn it?" Lissac repeated.

He had left the window, returned to Marianne and smiling in his turn, he said:

"Why burn it?—Because it is tiresome or because it is dangerous?"

"Both!" she replied.

She paused for a moment before continuing, drew up over her arms the lace of her chemisette, then half bending her head, and looking at Guy like a creditor of love she said:

"You still have my letters, my dear?"

"Your letters?"

"Those of the old days?"

"That is so," he said. "The past."

He understood everything now.

"You came to ask me to return them?"

"I have been, you must admit, very considerate, not to have claimed them—before!"

"You have been—generous!" answered Lissac, with a gracious smile.

He opened his secretaire, one of the drawers of which contained little packages folded and tied with bands of silk ribbon, that slept the sleep of forgotten things.

"There are your letters, my dear Marianne! But you have nothing to fear; they have never left this spot."

The eyes of the young woman sparkled with a joyous light. Slowly as if afraid that Guy would not give them to her, she extended her bare arm toward the packet of letters and snatched it suddenly.

"My letters!"

"It is an entire romance," said Lissac.

"Less the epilogue!" she said, still enveloping him with her intense look.

She placed the packet on the velvet-covered mantelpiece and hastily finished dressing. Then taking between her fingers those little letters in their old-fashioned envelopes bearing her monogram, and that still bore traces of a woman's perfume, she looked at them for a moment and said to Lissac:

"You have read them occasionally?"

"I know them by heart!"

"My poor letters!—I was quite sincere, you know, when I wrote you them!—They must be very artless! Yours, that I have burned, were too clever. I remember that one day you wrote me from Holland: 'I pass my life among chefs-d'oeuvre, but my mind is far away from them. I have Rembrandt and Ruysdael; but the smallest millet seed would be more to my liking: millet is fair!' Well, that was very pretty, but much too refined. True love has no wit.—All this is to convey to you that literature will not lose much by the disappearance of my disconnected scrawls."

She suddenly threw the packet into the fire and watched the letters as they lightly curled, at first spotted with fair patches, and enveloped in light smoke, then bursting into flame that cast its rosy reflection on Marianne's face. Little by little all disappeared save a patch of black powder on the logs, that danced like a mourning veil fluttering in the wind and immediately disappeared up the chimney:—the dust of dead love, the ashes of oaths, all black like mourning crepe.

Marianne watched the burning of the letters, bending her forehead, while a strange smile played on her lips, and an expression as of triumphant joy gleamed in her eyes.

When the work was done, she raised her head and turned toward Guy and in a quivering voice, she said proudly and insolently:

"Requiescat! See how everything ends! It is a long time since lovers who have ceased to love invented cremation! Nothing is new under the sun!"

She was no longer the same woman. A moment before she manifested a sort of endearing humility, but now she was ironically boastful, looking at Lissac with the air of one triumphing over a dupe. He bit his lips slightly, rubbing his hands together, while examining her sidelong, without affectation. Marianne's ironical smile told him all that she now had to say.

It was not the first time that he had been a witness to such a transformation of the feminine countenance before and after the return of letters. Guy for some time had ceased to be astonished at anything in connection with women.

"Now, my dear," said Marianne, "I hope that you will do me the kindness of allowing me to go on in my own way in life, and that I shall not have the annoyance of finding you again in the way of my purpose."

"I confess," Lissac replied, "that I should be the worst of ingrates if I did not forget many things in consideration of what I owe you, both in the present and in the past. Your burned letters still shed their fragrance!"

Marianne touched the half-consumed logs with the tip of her foot and the debris of the paper fluttered around her shoe like little black butterflies.

"I wish I could have destroyed the past as I have made those letters flame! It weighs on me, it chokes me! You do not imagine, perhaps," she said, "that I have forgiven you for your flight and all that followed it?—If, for a moment, I almost stumbled in the mire, the fault was yours, for I loved you and you abandoned me, as a man forsakes a strumpet.—So, you see, my dear, a woman never forgets it, and I would have cried out long before, if I had felt myself free, free as I am now that those letters are burned, the poor letters of a stupid mistress, confiding in her lover who is overcome with weariness, and who is only thinking of deserting her, while she is still intoxicated in yielding to him—and because I adored you—yes, truly—because I was your mistress, do you arrogate to yourself the right of preventing me from marrying as I wish, and of drawing myself out of the bog into which, perhaps, by your selfishness, I have fallen? Ah, my dear fellow, really I am somewhat surprised at you, I swear!—I said nothing because of those scraps of paper, that you would have been cowardly enough, I assert, to show Rosas and every line of which told how foolish I had been to love you."

"Monsieur de Rosas would never have seen them!" said Lissac severely.

She did not seem to hear him.

"But now, what? Thank God," she continued, "there is nothing, and you have delivered those letters to me that you ought never to have returned. And I have paid you for them, paid for them with new caresses and a last prostitution! Well! that ends it, doesn't it? There is nothing more between us, nothing, nothing, nothing!—And these two beings, who exchanged here their loveless kisses, the kisses of a debauchee and a courtesan, will never recognize each other again, I hope—you hear, never recognize each other again—when they meet in life. Moreover, I will take care to avoid meetings!"

Guy said nothing.

He twirled his moustache slightly and continued to look at Marianne sideways without replying.

This indifference, though doubtless assumed, nevertheless annoyed the young woman.

"Go, find Monsieur de Rosas now!" she said. "Tell him that you have been my lover, he will not believe you."

"I am satisfied of that," Lissac replied very calmly.

She realized a threat in his very calmness. But what had she to fear now?

She fastened her ironical glance on Lissac, the better to defy him, and to enjoy his defeat.

With extended hands, he noiselessly tapped his fingers together, the gesture of a person who waits, sure of himself and displaying a mocking silence.

"Then adieu!" she said abruptly. "I hope that we shall never see each other again!"

"How can you help it?" said Lissac, smiling. "In Paris!"

He sat down on a chair, while Marianne stood, putting on her gloves.

"On my word, my dear Marianne, for a clever woman you are outrageously sanguine."

"I?"

"And credulous! You credit me with the simplicity of the Age of Gold, then?—Is it possible?—Do you think a corrupted Parisian like myself would allow himself to be trifled with like a schoolboy by a woman as extremely seductive as I confess you are? But, my dear friend, the first rule in such matters is only to completely disarm one's self when it is duly proved that peace has been definitely signed and that a return to offensive tactics is not to be feared. You have shown your little pink claws too nimbly, Marianne. Too quickly and too soon. In one of those drawers, there are still one or two letters left, I was about to say, that belong to the series of letters that are slumbering: exquisite, perfumed, eloquent, written in that pretty, fine and firm writing that you have just thrown into the fire, and those letters I would only have given you on your continuing to act fairly. They were my reserve. It is an elementary rule never to use all one's powder at a single shot, and one never burns en bloc such delicate autographs. They are too valuable! Tell me, will you disdain to recognize me when you meet me, Miss Marianne?"

She remained motionless, pale and as if frozen.

"Then you have kept?—" she said.

"A postscriptum, if you like, yes."

"Are you lying now, or did you lie in giving me the packet that has been burned?"

"I did not tell you that the packet was complete, and what I now tell you is the simple truth! I regret it, but you have compelled me to keep my batteries, in too quickly unmasking your own."

Marianne pulled off her gloves in anger.

"If you do not give me everything here that belongs to me, you are a coward; you hear, a coward, Monsieur de Lissac!"

"Oh! your insults are of as little importance as your kisses! but they are less agreeable!"

She clearly saw that she had thrown off the mask too soon, and that Lissac would not now allow himself to be snared by her caresses or disarmed by her threats. The game was lost.

Lost, or merely compromised?

She looked about her with an expression of powerless rage, like a very graceful wild beast enclosed in a cage. Her letters, her last letters must be here, in one of those pieces of furniture whose drawers she might open with her nails. She threw her gloves on the floor and mechanically tore into shreds—as she always did when in a rage—between her nervous fingers, her fine cambric handkerchief reduced to rags.

"Be very careful what you are doing, Guy," she said at last, casting a malicious look at him, "I have purchased these letters from you, for I hate you, I repeat it, and these letters you owe to me as you would owe money promised to a wench. If you do not give them to me, I will have them, notwithstanding."

"Really?"

"I promise you I will."

"And suppose I have burned them?"

"You lie, you have them here, you have kept them. You have behaved toward me like a thief."

"Nonsense, Marianne," said Lissac coldly, "on my faith, I see I have done well to preserve some weapon against you. You are certainly very dangerous!"

"More than you imagine," she replied.

He moved slightly backward, seeing that she wished to pass him to reach the door.

"You will not give me back my letters?" she asked in a harsh and menacing tone as she stood on the threshold of the room.

Guy stooped without heeding her and picked up the gloves that were lying on the carpet and handed them to the young woman:

"This is your property, I think?"

This was said with insolently refined politeness.

Marianne took the gloves, and as a last insult, like a blow on the cheek, she threw them at Guy's face, who turned aside and the gloves fell on the bed where just before these two hatreds had come together in kisses of passion.

"Miserable coward!" said Marianne, surveying Lissac from head to foot with an expression of scorn, while he stood still, his monocle dangling at the end of a fine cord on his breast, near the buttonhole of his jacket that bore the red rosette; his face was pale but wore a sly expression.

That silk rosette looked there like a vermilion note stamped on a dark ground, and it seemed to pierce like a luminous drill into Marianne's eyes; and with her head erect, pallid face and trembling lip she passed before the domestic who hastened to open the door and went downstairs, repeating to herself with all the distracted fury of a fixed idea:

"To be avenged! To be avenged! Oh! to be avenged!"

She jumped into a cab.

"Well?"—said the coachman, looking with blinking eyes at this pale-faced, distraught-looking woman.

She remained there as if seeking an idea, a purpose.

"Where shall we go?" repeated the driver.

Suddenly Marianne's face trembled with a joyous expression and she abruptly said:

"To the Prefecture of Police!"

* * * * *

The general rose, grasping his glass as if he would shiver it, and while the parfait overflowed on to the plates, he cried in a hoarse voice, as if he were at the head of his division:

"I love bronze—I love bronze—...."



VI

There was a crowd at the Mirlitons Exposition.

A file of waiting carriages lined the kerbstone the whole length of Place Vendome. Beneath the arch and within the portal, groups of fashionable persons elbowed each other on entering or leaving, and exchanged friendly polite greetings; the women quizzing the new hats, little hoods of plush or large Rembranesque hats in which the delicate Parisian faces were lost as under the roof of a cabriolet. The liveried lackeys perfunctorily glanced at the cards of admission that the holders hardly took the trouble to present. One was seated at a table mechanically handing out catalogues. Through the open door of the Club's Theatre could be seen gold frames suspended from the walls, terra cottas and marbles on their pedestals, and around the pictures and sculptures a dense crowd, masses of black hats inclined toward the paintings, side by side with pretty feminine heads crowned with Gainsborough hats adorned with plumes. It was impossible to see at close quarters the pieces offered for the sale that was for that day the engrossing topic of conversation of All Paris.

"A veritable salon in miniature!" said Guy aloud to an art critic who was taking notes. "But to examine it comfortably one should be quite alone. For an hour past I have been trying to get a look at the Meissonier, but have not been able to do so. It is stifling here. I will return another time."

He quickly grasped the hand that held the pencil, and which was extended to him, and tried to make a passage through the crowd to the exit. Pushed and pushing, he smiled and apologized for his inability to disengage his arms that were held by the crowd as if in a vise, in order to salute the friends he recognized. At length he reached, giving vent to a grunt of satisfaction, the hall where visitors were sitting on divans, chatting, either less eager to view the pictures or satisfied in their desires. There, Guy instinctively looked at a mirror and examined the knot of his cravat. He did not notice that a gentleman with a closely buttoned frock-coat, on seeing him, quietly rose from the divan on which he had been sitting, and approached him, mechanically pulling the skirts of his coat meanwhile, so as to smooth the creases.

He simply touched Monsieur de Lissac's shoulder with the tip of his finger.

Guy turned round, expecting to recognize a friend.

"You are surely Monsieur de Lissac?" said the man in the frock-coat, with the refined manners of a gentleman.

"Yes!" said Lissac, somewhat astonished at the coldness of his manner.

"Be good enough to accompany me, monsieur, I am a Commissioner of the Judiciary Delegations!"

Lissac thought he misunderstood him.

"I confess that I don't quite understand you," he began, with a rather significant smile.

"I am a Commissioner of Police," the other replied, "and I am ordered to arrest you."

He suddenly exposed his insignia like the end of a sash, and by a very polite gesture, with an amiable and engaging manner, pointed to the way out by the side of the archway of the hotel.

"I have two of my men yonder, monsieur, but you will not place me under the necessity of—"

"What is this, monsieur?" said Lissac. "I frankly confess that I understand nothing of this enigma. I hope you will explain it to me."

All this was said in a conversational tone, mezzo voce, and accompanied with smiles. No one could have guessed what these two men were saying to each other. Only, Guy was very pale and his somewhat haughty glance around him seemed to indicate that he was seeking some support or witness.

He uttered a slight exclamation of satisfaction on perceiving the journalist to whom he had just before spoken a few words before a little canvas by Meissonier.

"My dear Brevans," he said in a loud voice, "here is an unpublished item for your journal. This gentleman has laid his hand on my collar."

With a sly look he indicated the Commissioner of Police, who did not budge.

"What! my dear fellow?"

"They have arrested me, that is all," said Lissac.

"Monsieur," the Commissioner quickly interrupted in a low voice, "no commotion, please. For my sake—and for yours."

He lightly touched Lissac's buttonhole with the end of his finger, as if to intimate that there was the explanation of his arrest, and Guy suddenly became very red and stamped his foot.

"Idiot that I am!—I am at your orders, monsieur," he said, making a sign to the Commissioner to pass out.

He again saluted the stupefied journalist, and the Commissioner bowing to him, out of politeness or prudence, Guy passed before him, angrily twirling his mustache.

Besides Brevans, nobody in all that crowd suspected that a man had just been arrested in the midst of the Exposition. Unless the journalist had hawked the news from group to group, it would not have been suspected.

Lissac found at the door of the Club on Place Vendome a hired carriage which had come up as soon as the driver saw the Commissioner. Two agents, having the appearance of good, peaceable bourgeois, were walking about, chatting together on the sidewalk, as if on duty. The Commissioner said to one of them:

"I have no further need of you, Crabot will do."

Crabot, a little man with the profile of a weasel, slowly mounted the box beside the coachman, and the Commissioner of Police took his seat next to Lissac, who had nervously plucked the rosette of the Portuguese Order of Christ from his buttonhole.

"What!" he said. "Really, then, it is for this? Because I wear this ribbon without having paid five or six louis into the Chancellery?—I have always intended to do so, but, believe me, I have not had the time. But a fiscal question does not warrant publicly insulting—"

"I do not know if it is for that," interrupted the Commissioner; "but it is evident that a recent note in the Officiel points directly to the illegal wearing of foreign decorations. You do not read the Officiel, Monsieur de Lissac."

Guy shrugged his shoulders as if he considered the matter perfectly ridiculous. It seemed to him that behind the alleged pretext there was some secret cause, something like a feminine intrigue. He vaguely recalled that he had seen Marianne one evening at Madame de Marsy's smile at the Prefect of Police, that Jouvenet who flirted so agreeably with that pretty girl in a corner of the salon. And then, too, at the theatre, in Marianne's box, the prefect found his way. At the first moment, the idea that Marianne had a hand in this arrest took possession of his mind. He saw her standing before him at his house, posing her little nervous, fidgety hand on his breast at the very spot occupied by this rosette; again he saw her smiling mysteriously, accompanying it with a caress which seemed to suggest the desire to end in a scratch.

Was it really true that Marianne was sufficiently audacious to have brought about this coup de theatre? No, there was some error. The stupid zeal of some subordinate officer was manifested in this outrage. Some cowardly charge had perhaps been made against him at the prefecture. Every man who crosses a street has so many enemies that look at him as he passes as if they would spy on him! There are so many undeclared hatreds crawling in the rotten depths of this Parisian bog! One fine morning one feels one's self stung in the heel. It is nothing: only some anonymous gossip; some unknown person taking revenge!

At the prefecture, they would doubtless inform Guy as to the cause of the attack: in questioning him, he would himself certainly be permitted to interrogate. He was stunned on arriving at the clerk's office to find that they took his description, just as they would that of a common offender, a night-walker or a rascal. He wished to enter a protest and became annoyed. He flew into a rage for a moment, then he reflected that there was nothing to be done but to submit to the bites of the iron teeth of the police routine in which he was suddenly entangled. They searched his pockets and he felt their vile hands graze his skin. He experienced a strongly rebellious sentiment and notwithstanding his present enforced calm, from time to time he demanded to see the Prefect of Police, the Chief of the Municipal Police, the Juge d'Instruction, he did not know whom, but at least some one who was responsible.

"You have my card, send my card to Monsieur Jouvenet; he knows me!"

They made no reply.

The Commissioner who had arrested him was not there. Guy found himself in the presence of what were as pieces of human machinery, working silently, without noise of wheels, and caring for his protests no more than they did for the wind that blew through the corridors.

"See, on my honor, I am not a rascal!" he said. "What have I done? I have stupidly passed this bit of red ribbon into my buttonhole. Well! that is an offence, it is not a crime! People are not arrested for that! I will pay the fine, if fine there is! You are not going to keep me here with thieves?"

In that jail, he endeavored to preserve his appearance as a fashionable elegant and an ironical man of the world, treating his misadventure in a spirit of haughty disdain; but his overstrained nerves led him to act with a sort of cold fury that gave him the desire to openly oppose, as in a duel, his many adversaries.

"I beg you to remain calm," one of these men repeated to him from time to time in a passionless way.

"Oh! that is easy enough for you to say," cried Lissac. "I ask you once more, where is Monsieur Jouvenet?—I wish to see Monsieur Jouvenet!"

"Monsieur le Prefect cannot be seen in this way," was the reply. "Moreover, you haven't to see any one; you have only to wait."

"Wait for what?"

They led Guy de Lissac through the passages to the door of a new cell, which they opened before him.

"Then," he said, as he tried to force a troubled smile, "I am a prisoner? Quite seriously? As in melodrama? This is high comedy!"

He asked if he would soon be examined, at least. They didn't know. They hardly replied to him. Could he write, at any rate? Notify any one? Protest? What should he do? He heard from the lips of a keeper who had the appearance of a very honest man, the information, crushing as a verdict: "You are in close confinement, as it is called!"

In close confinement? Were they mocking him? In secret, he, Lissac? Evidently, they wanted to make fun; it was absurd, it was unlikely, such things only happened in operettas. He would heartily relish it at the Cafe Riche presently, when he went to dine. In close confinement? He was no longer annoyed at the jest, so amusing had it become. For an old Parisian like him, it was a facetious romance and almost amusing.

"A climax!"

Evening passed and night came. They brought Lissac a meal, and the jest, as he called it, in no way came to an end. He did not close his eyes for the whole night. He was stifled, and grew angry within the narrow cage in which they had locked him. All sorts of wild projects of revenge passed through his brain. He would send his seconds to Monsieur Jouvenet, he would protest in the papers. He would have public opinion in his favor.

Then his scepticism came to his aid, and shrugging his shoulders, he said:

"Bah! public opinion! It will ridicule me, that's all! It will accuse me of desiring to make a stir, to cut off my dog's tail. To-day, Alcibiades would thus cut off his, but the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals would bring an action against him."

He waited for the next morning with the feverish anxiety of those who cannot sleep. Certainly he would be examined at the first moment. They did so in the case of the vagabonds gathered in during the night and dumped into the lions' den. The whole day passed without Lissac's seeing any other faces than those of his turnkeys, and these men were almost mutes. Then his irritation was renewed. He turned his useless anger against himself, as he could not insult the walls.

Night came round, and spite of himself, he slept for a short time on the wretched prison pallet. He began to find the facetious affair too prolonged and too gloomy. They took him just in time, the second day after his arrest, before a kind of magistrate or police judge, who, after having reminded him that the law was clear in respect of the wearing of foreign orders, announced that the matter was settled by a decree of nolle prosequi.

"That is to say," said Lissac, in anger, "that two nights passed in close confinement is regarded as ample punishment? If I am guilty of a crime, I deserve much more than that. But, if only a mere peccadillo is attributable to me, I consider it too much; and I swear to you that I intend, in my turn, to summon to justice for illegal arrest—"

"Keep quiet," curtly interrupted the magistrate. "That is the best thing you can do!"

Lissac, meantime, felt a sort of physical delight in leaving those cold passages and that stone dwelling.

The fresh breeze of a gray November day appeared to him to be as gentle as in spring. It seemed that he had lived in that den for weeks. He flung himself into a carriage, had himself driven home, and was received by his concierge with stupefied amazement.

"You, monsieur?" he said. "Already!"

This already was pregnant with suggestiveness, and puzzled Lissac. The rumor had, in fact, spread throughout the quarter, and probably the porter had helped it along—that Guy had been arrested for complicity in some political intrigue, though of what nature was unknown. Nevertheless, the previous evening, the agents of police had come to the apartments in Rue d'Aumale and had searched everything, moved, tried and probed everything. Evidently they were in quest of papers.

"Papers?" cried Lissac. "Her letter, parbleu!"

He was no longer in doubt. The delicate, dreaded hand of Marianne was at the bottom of all that. She had made some bargain with Monsieur Jouvenet, as between a woman and a debauchee! The Prefect of Police was not the loser: Marianne Kayser had the wherewithal to satisfy him.

"The miserable wench!" Lissac repeated as he went up to his apartment.

He rang and his servant appeared, looking as bewildered as the porter.

The apartment was still topsy-turvy. The valet de chambre had not dared to put the things in order, as if there reigned, amid the scattered packages and the yawning drawers, the majesty of the official seal.

They had examined everything, forced locks and removed packets of letters.

The small Italian cabinet, that contained Marianne's letter, had had its drawers turned over, like pockets turned inside out. Marianne's letter to Lissac, the scrap of paper which the police hunted, without knowing whose will they were obeying, that confession of a crazy mistress to a lover who was smitten to his very bones, was no longer there.

"Ah! I will see Vaudrey! I will see him and tell him!" said Lissac aloud.

"Will monsieur breakfast?"

"Yes, as quickly as possible. Two eggs and tea, I am in a hurry."

He was anxious to rush off to the ministry. Was the Chamber sitting to-day? No. He would perhaps then find Sulpice at his first call. The messengers knew him.

He speedily hastened to Place Breda, looking for a carriage. On the way, he stumbled against a man who came down on the same side, smoking a cigar.

"Oh! Monsieur de Lissac!"

Guy instinctively stepped back one pace; he recognized Uncle Kayser. Then, suddenly, his anger, which up to that time he had been able to restrain, burst forth, and in a few words energetic and rapid, he told Simon, who remained bewildered and somewhat pale, as if one had tried to force a quarrel on him, what he thought of Marianne's infamy.

The uncle said nothing, regretted that he had met Lissac, and contented himself with stammering from time to time:

"She has done that?—What! she has done that?—Ah! the rogue."

"And what do you say about it, you, Simon Kayser?"

"I?—What do I say about it?—Why—"

Little by little he recovered his sang-froid, looking at matters from the lofty heights of his artist's philosophy.

"It is rather too strong. What do you want?—It is not even moral, but it has character! And in art, after the moral idea comes character! Ah! bless me! character, that is something!—Otherwise, I disapprove. It is brutal, vulgar, that lack of ideal. I defy you to symbolize that. Love Avenging Itself Against Love—Jealousy Calling the Police to Its Aid in Order to Triumph over Dead Love! It is old, it lacks originality, it smacks of Prud'hon!—The Correggio of the decollete!—It is like Tassaert, it is of the sprightly kind!—I would never paint so, that is what I say about it!"

Guy had no reply for this imperturbable moralist and he regretted that he had lost time in speaking to him. But his uncontrollable rage choked him. Enough remained however to show all his feelings to Vaudrey.

The minister was not in his cabinet. A messenger asked Lissac if he would speak to Monsieur Warcolier, the Under Secretary of State.

"I, I," then said a man who rose from the chair in which he had been sitting in the antechamber, "I should be glad to see Monsieur Warcolier—Monsieur Eugene, you know."

"Very well, Monsieur Eugene, I will announce you." Lissac explained that his visit was not official, he called on a personal matter.

"Is the minister in his apartments?"

"Yes, monsieur, but to-day, you know—"

What was going on to-day, then? Lissac had not noticed, in fact, that a marquee with red stripes was being erected at the entrance to the hotel, and that upholsterers were bringing in wagons benches covered with red velvet with which they were blocking the peristyle. There was a reception at the ministry.

"That will not prevent Monsieur Vaudrey from seeing me," he said.

One of the messengers opened the doors in front of him and conducted him to the floor above, where Monsieur le Ministre was then resting near the fire and glancing over the papers after breakfast.

He appeared pleased but a little astonished at seeing Lissac.

"Eh! my dear Guy, what a good idea!—Have you arrived already for the soiree? You received your invitation?"

"No," answered Lissac, "I have received nothing, or if the invitation arrived, the agents of Monsieur Jouvenet have taken it away with many other things."

"The agents! what agents?" asked the minister.

He had risen to receive Guy and remained standing in front of the fireplace looking at his friend, who questioned him with his glance to discover if Vaudrey could really be in ignorance as to such a matter.

"Ah, so! but," said Lissac with trembling voice and in a tone of angry bitterness, "do you not know then, what takes place in Paris?"

"What is happening?" asked Sulpice, who had turned slightly pale.

"They arrest men for nothing, and keep them in close confinement for two days in order to have time to search their correspondence for a document that compromises certain persons. It is very proper, no doubt; but that smacks too much of romanticism and the Bridge of Sighs. It is very old-fashioned and worn-out. I would not answer for your long employing such methods of government."

"Come, are you mad? What does it all signify?" asked the minister, in astonishment.

He appeared as if he really did not understand. It was clear that he did not know what Guy meant.

"Don't you read the papers, then?" Lissac asked him.

"I read the reports of the Director of the Press."

"Well, if those reports have not informed you of my arrest in the heart of the Exposition des Mirlitons, on Wednesday, they have told you nothing!—"

"Arrested! you?"

"By the agents of Monsieur Jouvenet, your Prefect of Police, to gratify your mistress, Mademoiselle Kayser!"

"Ah! my dear Guy!" said the minister, whose cheek became flushed in spots. "I should be glad if you—"

He paused for a phrase to express clearly and briefly that he required Lissac to be silent, but could not frame one. He received, as it were, a sudden and violent blow on the head. Beyond question, he did not know a word of all that Lissac had informed him. And yet this was the gossip of Paris for two days! Either naming in full, or in indicating him sufficiently clearly, the newspapers had related the adventure on their front page. Moreover, much attention had been attracted to an article in a journal with which Lucien Granet was intimately connected, wherein, in well-turned but perfidious phrases, a certain Alkibiades—Lissac had guessed that this name was applied to him—had been arrested by the orders of the archon Sulpicios at the instance of a certain Basilea, one of the most charming hetaires of the republic of Perikles. Under this Greco-Parisian disguise it was easy for everyone to discover the true names and to see behind the masks the faces intended.

At the very moment that Lissac called to ask the minister for an explanation of the acts of the Prefect Jouvenet, Madame Vaudrey was opening a copy of a journal in which these names travestied by some Hellenist of the boulevard were underlined in red pencil. The article entitled The Mistress of an Archon, had been specially sent to her under a cover bearing the address in a woman's handwriting, Sabine Marsy or Madame Gerson! Some friend. One always has such.

It was of Adrienne that Vaudrey thought while Lissac was giving vent to his ironical, blunt complaint. Was Guy mad to speak of Marianne aloud in this way, and in this place, a few feet away from his wife, who could hear everything? Yes, Lissac was over-excited, furious and apparently crazy. He did not lower his tone, in spite of the sudden terror expressed by Vaudrey, who seized his hand and said to him eagerly: "Why, keep quiet! Suppose some one is listening?"

He felt himself, moreover, impelled by a violent rage. If what Guy told him were correct, Marianne had made use of him and of the title of mistress that she ought to have concealed. She had played it in order to compel Jouvenet to commit an outrage.

"Nonsense!" said Lissac, sneeringly. "Are you innocent enough to believe that she has seduced the Prefect of Police by simply telling him that she was your mistress? You don't know her. She only did this in becoming his!"

Sulpice had become livid, and he looked at Lissac with a sudden expression of hatred, as if this man had been his enemy. Guy had directly attacked his vanity and his heart with a knife-thrust, as it were, without sparing either his self-love or his passion.

"Ah! yes," said Lissac, "I know very well that that annoys you, but it is so! I knew this young lady before you did. Let her commit all the follies that she chooses with others and throw me overboard at a pinch, as she did three days ago, all is for the best. She is playing her role. I am only an imbecile and I am punished for it, and it is well; but, in order to attack me, to secure a very tiny paper, which put her very nicely at my mercy, that she should commit a foolish and brutal outrage against you who answer for the personnel of your administration, I cannot forgive. She thought then that I would make use of this note against her? She takes me for a rascal? If I wished to commit an act of treachery, could I not go this very moment, even without the weapon that Jouvenet's agents have taken from me, straight to her Rosas?"

"Rosas?" asked Sulpice, whose countenance contorted, and who feverishly twisted his blond beard.

"Eh! parbleu, yes, Rosas! On my honor, one would take you for the Minister of the Interior of the Moon! Rosas, who perhaps is her lover, but will be her husband if she wishes it! and she does!"

Poor Sulpice looked at Lissac with a terrified expression which might have been comic, did it not in its depth portray a genuine sorrow. He was oblivious to everything now, where he was, if Guy spoke too loudly, or if Adrienne could hear. He was only conscious of a terrible strain of his mind. This sudden revelation lacerated him—as if his back received the blows of a whip. He wished to know all. He questioned Lissac, forcing him into a corner, and making him hesitate, for he now feared that he would say too much, and limited himself to demanding Jouvenet's punishment.

"As to Marianne, one would see to that after," he said.

Ah! yes, certainly, Jouvenet should be punished! How? Vaudrey could not say, but from this moment the Prefect of Police was condemned. Guy's arrest, which was an act of brutal aggression, was tantamount to a dismissal signed by the Prefect himself. And Marianne! she then made a sport of Sulpice and took him for a child or a ninny!

"Not at all. For a man who loves, that is enough," replied Lissac.

Vaudrey had flung himself into an armchair, striking his fist upon the little table, covered with the journals that he had scarcely opened, and absent-mindedly pushing the chair back, the better to give way to his excessively violent threats, after the manner of weak natures.

"Do you want my advice?" Lissac abruptly asked him. "You have only what you deserve, ah! yes, that is just it! I tell you the sober truth. A wife like yours should never be forsaken for a creature like Marianne!"

"I love Adrienne sincerely!" replied Vaudrey eagerly.

"And you deceive her entirely. That is foolish. You deserve that Mademoiselle Kayser should have ridiculed, deceived and ruined you irretrievably, and that your name should never be uttered again. When one has the opportunity to possess a wife like yours, one adores her on bended knees, you understand me, and one doesn't destroy her true happiness to divert it in favor of the crowd. And what pleasure! Jouvenet has had the same dose at a less cost!"

"You abuse the rights of friendship, somewhat," said Sulpice, rising suddenly. "I do what pleases me, as it pleases me, and I owe no account to any one, I think!"

He stopped suddenly. His feet were, as it were, nailed to the floor and his mouth closed. He seized Guy's hand and felt his flesh creep, as he saw Adrienne standing pale, and supporting herself against the doorpost, as if she had not the strength to proceed, her eyes wide open, like those of a sick person.

Assuredly, beyond all possible doubt, she had heard everything.

She was there! she heard!

She said nothing, but moved a step forward, upheld by a terrible effort.

Her look was that of a whipped child, of a poor creature terrified and in despair, and expressed not anger but entire collapse. She was so wan, so sad-looking, that neither Lissac nor Vaudrey dared speak. A chill silence fell upon these three persons.

While Adrienne approached the table upon which the journals were piled, Guy was the first to force a smile to throw her off the scent; Adrienne stopped him with a gesture that was intended to express that to undeceive her, that is to say, to deceive her afresh, would be a still more cowardly act. She took from among the journals that which she had just been reading without at first quite understanding it, the one that had been sent to her, underlined as with a venomous nail, and showing to Vaudrey the article that spoke of Sulpicios and Basilea, she said gently in a feeble voice, crushed by this crumbling of her hopes:

"That is known then, that affair!"

Then she sunk exhausted into the armchair in which Sulpice had been sitting, and her breast heaved with a violent sob that tore it as if it would rend it.

Sulpice looked at Lissac who was standing half-inclined, as in the presence of a misfortune. He instinctively seized the minister by the shoulder and gently forced him toward Adrienne, saying to him in a whisper, in ill-assured tones:

"Kiss her then! One pardons when one loves!"

With a supplicating cry, Vaudrey threw himself on his knees before Adrienne, while Lissac hastily opened the door and left, feeling indeed that he could not say a word and that Vaudrey only could obtain Vaudrey's pardon.

"I, in my anger," he said, "he, in his jealousy, have allowed ourselves to get into a passion. It is stupid. One should speak lower."

He went away, much dissatisfied with himself and but little less with Vaudrey. Again he considered this man foolish, adored as he was by such a wife, whom he deceived. He was not sure that at the bottom of his own heart he did not feel a sentiment of love toward Adrienne. Ah! if he had been loved by such a creature, he would have been capable of great things!—He would have arranged and utilized his life instead of spoiling it. In place of vulgar love, he would have kept this unique love intact from the altar to the tomb!

Pale and tottering, and a child once more under her sorrow, as he had just seen her, she was so adorably lovely that he had received an entirely new impression, one of almost jealousy against Sulpice, and therefore, brusquely overcoming this strange, unseemly emotion, he had himself thrust Vaudrey toward his wife and had departed hastily, as if he felt that he must hurry away and never see them again. But as he left, on the contrary, he saw her again with her sad, wretched, suffering look and the young wife's sorrowful voice went with him, repeating in a tone of broken-hearted grief:

"That is known then!"

"Ah! that miserable fellow, Vaudrey!" thought Guy.

In going out, he had to wait a moment in the antechamber, to admit of the passage of some vases of flowers, green shrubs and variegated foliage plants that were being brought in to decorate the salons. A fete! And this evening! In the arrival of those flowers for decoration, at the moment when chance, clumsily or wickedly, so suddenly revealed that crushing news, Guy saw so much irony that he could not forbear looking at them for a moment, almost insulting in their beauty and their hothouse bloom.

Would Adrienne have the courage or strength to undertake the reception of the evening, within a few hours? Guy was annoyed at having come.

"I could well have waited and kept my anger to myself. The unhappy woman would have known nothing."

"Bah!" he added. "She is kind, she adores Sulpice, it is only a passing storm. She will forgive!"

He promised himself, moreover, to return in the evening, to excuse himself to Adrienne, to comfort her if he could.

"There is some merit, after all, in that," he thought again. "On my word! I believe I love her and yet I am angry with that animal Vaudrey for not loving her enough."

She will forgive!—Lissac knew courtesans but he did not know this woman, energetic as she was under her frail appearance, a child, a little provincial lost in the life of Paris, lost and, as it were, absorbed in the hubbub of political circles, smitten with her husband, who comprehended in her eyes every seduction and superiority, having given herself entirely and wishing to wholly possess the elect being who possessed her, in whom she trusted and to whom she gave herself, body and soul, with all her confidence, her innocence and her modesty. He did not know what such a sensitive, nervously frail nature could feel on the first terrible impulses, full of enthusiasm under her exterior coldness, of resolution concealed under her timid manners, capable of madness, distracted in spite of her reason and calm; this candor of thought, of education, and associations that made her, with all her irresistible attractiveness, the virtuous woman with all her charm.

Adrienne had at first read the journal that had been sent to her without understanding anything about it. Alkibiades, Basilea, the mistress of the Archon, what signified that to her? What did it mean? Then suddenly her thought rested on the name of Sulpice, travestied in the Greek of parody, Sulpicios. Was it of her husband that they intended to speak? She immediately felt a bitter anguish at heart, but it was a matter only of allowing one's self to be impressed by a journalistic pleasantry, as contemptible as an anonymous letter! She would think no more about it. She must concentrate her thoughts on the evening's reception. There was to be an official repast, followed by a soiree. She had nothing to concern herself about in regard to the menu; Chevet undertook that. For the ministerial dinners there was a fixed price as in restaurants. Hosts and guests live au cabaret, they dine at so much a head. Adrienne endeavored to occupy herself with the musical soiree, with the programmes that they brought her, with the names of comedians and female singers, printed on vellum, and with those bouquets with which the vases of her little salon were decorated. Ah! well, yes, in spite of the feverish activity, she could think only of that article in the journal, that miserable article, every line of which flamed before her eyes just as when one has looked too long at a fire. She had been seized with the temptation there and then to openly ask Sulpice what these veiled illusions meant.

"I hope, indeed," she thought, with her contempt of all lying, "that he will not charge me with suspecting him. No, certainly, I do not suspect him."

She went to the little cabinet where Sulpice sometimes read or worked after breakfast, and there, as if she had thrown herself upon an open knife, she suddenly heard those sinister words which pierced her very flesh like pointed blades.

They were speaking of another woman. Lissac said in a loud tone: Your mistress! and Vaudrey allowed it to be said!—

A mistress! what mistress? Marianne Kayser! Oh, that woman of whom Sulpice had so often spoken in an indifferent manner, that pretty creature, so often seen, seductive, wonderfully beautiful, terrifyingly beautiful, it was she! Your mistress! Sulpice had a mistress! He lied, he deceived. He? She was betrayed! Was it possible? If it were possible? But it was true! Eh! parbleu, yes, it was true—And this, then, was why they had sent her this horrible article! She knew now.

She had been tempted to enter the room suddenly, to throw herself between these men and interrupt their conversation. She had not the strength. And then, what Lissac said had the effect of consoling her!—Guy's reproaches to Sulpice were such as she would have liked to cast at him, if she could have found speech now. But not a word could she frame. She was stunned, dumb and like a crushed being. She knew only one thing, that she suffered horribly, as she had never before suffered.

At first she allowed Vaudrey, who knelt at her feet, as Lissac had told him on going away, to take her hand that hung listlessly down. Then she gently withdrew it as if she felt herself seized by an instinctive sense of outraged modesty.

Vaudrey tried to speak. At first only confused words, silly excuses, clumsy falsehoods, cruelly absurd phrases—caprices, nothing serious, whim, madness—so many avowals, so many insults, came to his lips. But then, before the silence of Adrienne, he could say nothing more, he was speechless, overwhelmed, and sought a hand that was refused.

"Will you never forgive me?" he asked at last, not knowing too well what he said.

"Never!" she said coldly.

She rose and with as much sudden energy as but a moment before she had felt of weakness, she crossed the room.

"Are you going away?" stammered Sulpice.

"Yes, I must be alone—Ah! quite alone," she said, with a sort of gesture of disgust as she saw her husband approach her.

He stopped and said, as if by chance:

"You know that—this evening—"

"Yes, yes," she replied, "do not be anxious about anything! I am still the minister's wife, if I am Madame Vaudrey no longer."

He tried in vain to reply.

Adrienne had already disappeared.

"There is the end of my happiness!" Sulpice stammered as he suddenly confronted an unknown situation dark as an abyss. "Ah! how wretched I am! Very wretched! whose fault is it?"

He plunged gladly into the work of examining the bundles of reports from the prefects, feverishly inspecting them to deafen and blind his conscience, and seized at every moment with a desire to make an appeal to Adrienne or to go and insult Marianne. Oh! especially to tell Marianne that she had betrayed him, that she was a wretch, that she was the mistress of Rosas, the mistress of Jouvenet, a strumpet like any other strumpet, yes, a strumpet!

Amid all the disturbance of that day of harsh misfortune, perhaps he thought more of the Marianne that he had lost than of the Adrienne that he had outraged; while the wife questioned with herself if it were really she coming and going, automatically trying on her ball costume, abandoning her head to the hair-dresser, feeling that in two hours she would be condemned to smile on the minister's guests, the senators and the deputies and play the part of a spectre, marching in the land of dreams, in a nightmare that choked her, fastened on her throat and heart and prompted her to cry and weep, all her poor nerves intensely strained and sick, subdued by the energy of a tortured person, imposing on herself the task of not appearing to suffer and—a still more atrocious thing—of not even suffering in reality and waiting, yes, waiting to sob.

In the evening, everything blazed on the facade of the ministry. The rows of gas-jets suggested that a public fete was being held in the Hotel Beauvau. The naming capital letters R.F. were boldly outlined against the dark sky, the three colors of the flags looked bright in the ruddy light of the gas. Carriages rolled over the sanded courtyard, giving up at the carpeted entrance to the hotel the invited guests dressed in correct style, the women wrapped in ample cloaks with gold fringe or trimmed with fur, and all poured into the antechamber, brushing against the Gardes de Paris in white breeches, with grounded arms, forming a row and standing out like Caryatides against the shining, large leaved green flowers on which their white helmets shone by the light of the lustres. In the dressing-room, the clothing was piled up, tied together in haste; the antechamber was quickly crossed, the women in passing casting rapid glances at the immense mirrors; a servant asked the names of the guests and repeated them to an usher, whose loud voice penetrated these salons that for many years had heard so many different names, of all parties, under all regimes, and proclaimed them in the usual commonplace manner, while murdering the most celebrated of them. Upon the threshold of the salon, filled with fashionable people and flooded with intense light, stood the minister, who had been receiving, greeting, bowing, ever since the opening of the soiree, to those who arrived, some of whom he did not know; crowding behind him, correctly dressed, stood his secretaries, the members of his cabinet appropriating their shares of the greetings extended to the Excellency, and at his side stood Madame Vaudrey, pale and smiling as the creatures of the other world; she also bowed and from time to time extended her gloved hand mechanically; pale she looked in her decollete gown of white satin, clasped at the shoulders with two pearl clasps, a bouquet of natural roses in her corsage, and standing there like a melancholy spectre on the very threshold of the festive salons.

When she perceived Guy enter, she greeted him with a sad smile, and Vaudrey eagerly offered his hand to him as if he relied greatly on him to arrange matters.

Adrienne's repressed grief had pained Lissac. While to the other guests she appeared to be only somewhat fatigued, to him the open wound and sorrow were visible. He plunged into the crowd. Beneath the streaming light the diamonds on the women's shoulders gleamed like the lustres' crystals. Within a frame of gobelins and Beauvais tapestry taken from the repository, was an improvised scene that looked like a green and pink nest of camellias, dracaenas and palms. The bright toilettes of the women already seated before this scenic effect presented a wealth of pale blue, white or pink silk, mother-of-pearl shoulders, diamonds, and bows of pink or feather headdresses. Guy recognized Madame Marsy in the front row, robed in a very low-cut, sea-green satin robe with a bouquet of flowers at the tip of the shoulder, who while fanning herself looked with haughty impertinence at the pretty Madame Gerson, her former friend. Madame Evan was numerously surrounded, she was the most charming of all the stylish set and the woman whom all the others tried to copy.

Behind this species of female flower-bed the black coated ranks crowded, their sombre hue relieved here and there by the uniform of some French officer or foreign military attache. There was a profusion of orders, crosses and strange old faces, with red ribbons at the neck, deputies evidently in dress, youthful attaches of the ministry or embassy, correct in bearing and officious, their crush-hats under their arms and holding the satin programme of the musicale soiree in their hands, some numbers of which were about to be rendered. Under the ceilings that were dappled with painted clouds, surrounded by brilliant lights and a wealth of flowers, this crowd presented at once an aspect of luxury and oddity, with its living antitheses of old parliamentarians and tyros of the Assembly.

Intermingled with strains of music, were whisperings and the confused noise of conversations.

Guy watched with curiosity, as a man who has seen much and compares, all this gathering of guests. From time to time he greeted some one of his acquaintance, but this was a rare occurrence. He was delighted to see Ramel whom he had often met at Adrienne's Wednesdays, and whom he liked. He appeared to him to be fatigued and sick.

"I am not very well, in fact," said Ramel. "I have only come because I had something serious to say to Vaudrey."

"What then?" asked Lissac.

"Oh! nothing! some advice to give him as to the course to be followed. There is decidedly much underhand work going on about the President."

"Who is it?"

"Most of them are here!"

"His guests?"

"You know very well that when one invites all one's friends, one finds that three-quarters of one's enemies will be present."

"At least," said Lissac.

He continued to traverse the salons, always returning instinctively toward the door at which Adrienne stood, with pale face and wandering look, and scarcely hearing, poor woman, the unfamiliar names that the usher uttered at equal intervals, like a speaking machine.

"Monsieur Durosoi!—Monsieur and Madame Brechet!—Monsieur the Minister of Public Works!—Monsieur the Prefect of the Aube!—Monsieur the Count de Grigny!—Monsieur Henri de Prangins!—Monsieur the General d'Herbecourt!—Monsieur the Doctor Vilandry!—Monsieur and Madame Tochard!"

She had vowed that she would be strong, and allow nothing to be seen of the despair that was wringing her heart. She compelled herself to smile. In nightmares and hours of feverish unrest, she had suffered the same vague, morbid feeling that she now experienced. All that passed about her seemed to be unreal. These white-cravatted men, these gaily-dressed women, the file of guests saluting her at the same spot in the salon, with the same expression of assumed respect and trite politeness, appeared to her but a succession of phantoms. Neither a name nor an association did she attach to those countenances that beamed on her with an official smile or gravely assumed a correct seriousness. She felt weary, overwhelmed and heavy-headed at the sight of this continued procession of strangers on whom it was incumbent that she should smile and to whom she must bow out of politeness, in virtue of that duty of state which she wished to fulfil to the last degree, poor soul!

The distant music of Fahrbach's polkas or Strauss's waltzes seemed like an added accompaniment that mocked the sadness of her unwholesome dream.

"And yet, in all that crowd of women who salute her, there are some who are jealous of her! Many envy her!" thought Guy, who was looking on.

Adrienne did not look at Vaudrey. She was afraid that if her eyes met her husband's fixed on her own, she would lose her sang-froid and suddenly burst into sobs, there before the guests. That would have been ridiculous. This blonde, so feebly gentle, isolated herself, therefore, with surprising determination and seemed to see nothing save her own thought, the unique thought: "Be strong. You shall weep at your ease when you are alone, far away from these people, far away from this crowd, alone with yourself, entirely alone, entirely alone!"

Vaudrey was very pale, but carried away, in spite of himself, by the joy which he felt in receiving all the illustrious and powerful men of the state, foreign ambassadors, the Presidents of the Senate and the Chamber, the ministers, his colleagues, deputies, wealthy financiers, renowned publicists, in fact, everything that counts and has a name in Paris,—this minister, happy to see the crowd running to him, at his house, bowing, paying homage to him, for a moment forgot the crushing events of that day, the sudden thunderbolt falling on him and perhaps, as he had said, crushing his hearthstone.