d partner to M. Pons; Fritz Brunner expressed
his thanks for the trouble which Pons had been so good as to take.

In the conversation which followed, the two old bachelors Schmucke and
Pons extolled the estate of matrimony, going so far as to say, without
any malicious intent, "that marriage was the end of man." Tea and ices,
punches and cakes, were served in the future home of the betrothed
couple. The wine had begun to tell upon the honest merchants, and the
general hilarity reached its height when it was announced that Schwab's
partner thought of following his example.

At two o'clock that morning, Schmucke and Pons walked home along the
boulevards, philosophizing _a perte de raison_ as they went on the
harmony pervading the arrangements of this our world below.

On the morrow of the banquet, Cousin Pons betook himself to his fair
cousin the Presidente, overjoyed--poor dear noble soul!--to return good
for evil. Surely he had attained to a sublime height, as every one will
allow, for we live in an age when the Montyon prize is given to those
who do their duty by carrying out the precepts of the Gospel.

"Ah!" said Pons to himself, as he turned the corner of the Rue de
Choiseul, "they will lie under immense obligations to their parasite."

Any man less absorbed in his contentment, any man of the world, any
distrustful nature would have watched the President's wife and daughter
very narrowly on this first return to the house. But the poor musician
was a child, he had all the simplicity of an artist, believing in
goodness as he believed in beauty; so he was delighted when Cecile and
her mother made much of him. After all the vaudevilles, tragedies, and
comedies which had been played under the worthy man's eyes for twelve
long years, he could not detect the insincerity and grimaces of social
comedy, no doubt because he had seen too much of it. Any one who goes
into society in Paris, and knows the type of woman, dried up, body and
soul, by a burning thirst for social position, and a fierce desire to
be thought virtuous, any one familiar with the sham piety and the
domineering character of a woman whose word is law in her own house, may
imagine the lurking hatred she bore this husband's cousin whom she had
wronged.

All the demonstrative friendliness of mother and daughter was lined with
a formidable longing for revenge, evidently postponed. For the first
time in Amelie de Marville's life she had been put in the wrong,