thousand francs? Don't be
a fool; how can you and I afford to quarrel? Things have gone against
you in spite of all my care; but you don't understand me."

"Then we must understand each other," said the colonel. "Get me a wife
with a hundred and fifty thousand francs before the elections; if not
--look out for yourself! I don't like unpleasant bed-fellows, and
you've pulled the blankets all over to your side. Good-evening."

"You shall see," said Vinet, grasping the colonel's hand
affectionately.

* * * * *

About one o'clock that night three clear, sharp cries of an owl,
wonderfully well imitated, echoed through the square. Pierrette heard
them in her feverish sleep; she jumped up, moist with perspiration,
opened her window, saw Brigaut, and flung down a ball of silk, to
which he fastened a letter. Sylvie, agitated by the events of the day
and her own indecision of mind, was not asleep; she heard the owl.

"Ah, bird of ill-omen!" she thought. "Why, Pierrette is getting up!
What is she after?"

Hearing the attic window open softly, Sylvie rushed to her own window
and heard the rustle of paper against her blinds. She fastened the
strings of her bed-gown and went quickly upstairs to Pierrette's room,
where she found the poor girl unwinding the silk and freeing the
letter.

"Ha! I've caught you!" cried the old woman, rushing to the window,
from which she saw Jacques running at full speed. "Give me that
letter."

"No, cousin," said Pierrette, who, by one of those strong inspirations
of youth sustained by her own soul, rose to a grandeur of resistance
such as we admire in the history of certain peoples reduced to
despair.

"Ha! you will not?" cried Sylvie, advancing upon the girl with a face
full of hatred and fury.

Pierrette fell back to get time to put her letter in her hand, which
she clenched with unnatural force. Seeing this manoeuvre Sylvie
grasped the delicate white hand of the girl in her lobster claws and
tried to open it. It was a frightful struggle, an infamous struggle;
it was more than a physical struggle; it assailed the mind, the sole
treasure of the human being, the thought, which God has placed beyond
all earthly power and guards as the secret way between the sufferer
and Himself. The two women, one dying, the other in the vigor of
health, looked at each other fixedly. Pierrette's eyes darted on her
executioner the look the famous Templar on the rack cast upon Phi