Caroline is playing Schubert's melodies. Adolphe takes great pleasure
in hearing these compositions well-executed: he gets up and
compliments Caroline. She bursts into tears.

"What's the matter?"

"Nothing, I'm nervous."

"I didn't know you were subject to that."

"O Adolphe, you won't see anything! Look, my rings come off my
fingers: you don't love me any more--I'm a burden to you--"

She weeps, she won't listen, she weeps afresh at every word Adolphe
utters.

"Suppose you take the management of the house back again?"

"Ah!" she exclaims, rising sharply to her feet, like a spring figure
in a box, "now that you've had enough of your experience! Thank you!
Do you suppose it's money that I want? Singular method, yours, of
pouring balm upon a wounded heart. No, go away."

"Very well, just as you like, Caroline."

This "just as you like" is the first expression of indifference
towards a wife: and Caroline sees before her an abyss towards which
she had been walking of her own free will.

THE FRENCH CAMPAIGN.

The disasters of 1814 afflict every species of existence. After
brilliant days of conquest, after the period during which obstacles
change to triumphs, and the slightest check becomes a piece of good
fortune, there comes a time when the happiest ideas turn out blunders,
when courage leads to destruction, and when your very fortifications
are a stumbling-block. Conjugal love, which, according to authors, is
a peculiar phase of love, has, more than anything else, its French
Campaign, its fatal 1814. The devil especially loves to dangle his
tail in the affairs of poor desolate women, and to this Caroline has
come.

Caroline is trying to think of some means of bringing her husband
back. She spends many solitary hours at home, and during this time her
imagination works. She goes and comes, she gets up, and often stands
pensively at the window, looking at the street and seeing nothing, her
face glued to the panes, and feeling as if in a desert, in the midst
of her friends, in the bosom of her luxuriously furnished apartments.

Now, in Paris, unless a person occupy a house of his own, enclosed
between a court and a garden, all life is double. At every story, a
family sees another family in the opposite house. Everybody plunges
his gaze at will into his neighbor's domains. There is a necessity for
mutual observation, a common right of search from which none can
escape. At a giv