ross that girl on his road, who would
make him loose, and soil him with unclean love. She would lower him, and
bring him down to the level of rollicking troopers, who are welcome
guests in houses of bad character.

"Well," one of them said suddenly, "suppose we go and finish the night
at that establishment; it will be far jollier, and the chief will not be
obliged to cudgel his brains to remember the name of the girl he loves!"

* * * * *

The officers pushed open the door of the saloon, where a servant was
lighting the chandelier, and Marchessy called out in a loud voice, and
amidst bursts of laughter:

"Here, Lucie! We have brought your sweetheart to you!"

She came in first, slowly, and wrapped in a transparent muslin
dressing-gown, and stopped, as if the beating of her heart were choking
her. The bandmaster did not move or say a word; he resembled a duellist,
who sees his adversary advancing towards him and taking aim at him, and
who is waiting for death.

Great drops of perspiration rolled down his face, and all the blood had
left it, while the woman looked at him, and did not appear to recognize
him, although her eyes wore a look of triumphant pleasure, and when he
started back, and turned his head away, she said to him, in a mocking
voice:

"What, my dear, are you not going to kiss me, after a whole year? ... I
must have altered very much, very much indeed ... Do not my mouth, and
this mark by the side of my ear, bring something to your mind?"

And Varache, who had just lit a cigar, muttered: "Are you going to act
a play until to-morrow?"

Then Lucie threw herself on to a sofa, and with her chin in her hands,
and in the posture of a chimera on the look out for the pleasures she
wishes, continued gravely:

"We lived at the end of a quiet street behind the cathedral, a street in
which pots of carnations stood on the window ledges, through which the
seminarists went twice a day, as if it had been a procession, and where
I was bored to death. Our parents' shop was cold and dark; my mother
thought of nothing but of going to all the services, and of attending
the _novenas_, while my father bent over the counter. There was nobody
to pet me, to advise me, or to teach me what life really was, and
besides that, I had the instinctive feeling that they cared for nobody
in this world but my brother.

"The first kiss that touched my lips nearly sent me mad, and I had not
the force t