grow altogether crimson.

"That is she," he said, walking on quickly, so as to escape my further
questions.

But I was egged on by curiosity, and I made a direct appeal to our
host's complaisance. "I should like to see this _Frieze_," I said. "Who
is _Frieze_?"

He turned round and said: "Oh! nothing, nothing, he is not at all
interesting. What is the good of seeing him? It is not worth while."

And he ran downstairs, two at a time. He who was usually so delicate,
and so very careful to explain everything, was now in a hurry to get
finished, and our visit was cut short.

The next day I had to leave that part of the country, without hearing
anything more about Babette, but I came back about four months later,
when the shooting season began. I had not forgotten her during that
time, for nobody could ever forget her eyes, and so I was very glad to
have as my traveling companion on my three hours' diligence journey from
the station to my friend's house, a man who talked to me about her all
the time.

He was a young magistrate whom I had already met, and who had much
interested me by his wit and his close manner of observing things, and
by his singularly refined casuistry, and, above all, by the contrast
between his professional severity, and his tolerant philosophy.

But he never appeared so attractive to me as he did on that day, when he
told me the history of that mysterious Babette.

He had inquired into it, and had applied all his faculties as an
examining magistrate to it, for, like me, his visit to the asylum had
roused his curiosity. This is what he had learned and what he told me.

When she was ten years old, Babette had been violated by her own father,
and at thirteen she had been sent to the house of correction for
vagabondage and debauchery. From the time she was twenty until she was
forty she had been a servant in the neighborhood, frequently changing
her situation, and being nearly everywhere her employer's mistress, and
she had ruined several families without getting any money herself, or
without gaining any definite position. A shopkeeper had committed
suicide on her account, and a respectable young fellow had turned thief
and incendiary, and had finished at the hulks.

She had been married twice, and had twice been left a widow, and for ten
years, until she was fifty, she had been the only commodity in the
district, for pleasure, to which five villages came to amuse themselves
on holidays.

"Sh