of me?"

"But we do not live for the world!" cried she, raising Etienne and
making him sit by her. "Besides, we shall be married some day--we have
the risks of a sea voyage----"

"I never thought of that," said Lousteau simply; and he added to
himself, "Time enough to part when little La Baudraye is safe back
again."

From that day forth Etienne lived in luxury; and Dinah, on first nights,
could hold her own with the best dressed women in Paris. Lousteau was
so fatuous as to affect, among his friends, the attitude of a man
overborne, bored to extinction, ruined by Madame de la Baudraye.

"Oh, what would I not give to the friend who would deliver me from
Dinah! But no one ever can!" said he. "She loves me enough to throw
herself out of the window if I told her."

The journalist was duly pitied; he would take precautions against
Dinah's jealousy when he accepted an invitation. And then he was
shamelessly unfaithful. Monsieur de Clagny, really in despair at seeing
Dinah in such disgraceful circumstances when she might have been so
rich, and in so wretched a position at the time when her original
ambitions would have been fulfilled, came to warn her, to tell her--"You
are betrayed," and she only replied, "I know it."

The lawyer was silenced; still he found his tongue to say one thing.

Madame de la Baudraye interrupted him when he had scarcely spoken a
word.

"Do you still love me?" she asked.

"I would lose my soul for you!" he exclaimed, starting to his feet.

The hapless man's eyes flashed like torches, he trembled like a leaf,
his throat was rigid, his hair thrilled to the roots; he believed he was
so blessed as to be accepted as his idol's avenger, and this poor joy
filled him with rapture.

"Why are you so startled?" said she, making him sit down again. "That is
how I love him."

The lawyer understood this argument _ad hominem_. And there were tears
in the eyes of the Judge, who had just condemned a man to death!

Lousteau's satiety, that odious conclusion of such illicit relations,
had betrayed itself in a thousand little things, which are like grains
of sand thrown against the panes of the little magical hut where
those who love dwell and dream. These grains of sand, which grow to
be pebbles, had never been discerned by Dinah till they were as big
as rocks. Madame de la Baudraye had at last thoroughly understood
Lousteau's character.

"He is," she said to her mother, "a poet, defenceless again