a signal service. The
girl does not love you, and you love nothing but the eyes of her
"dot"; I have therefore saved you both from a species of hell.
But, in exchange for the bride you have so curtly rejected,
another charming girl is proposed to you; she is richer and more
beautiful than Mademoiselle Colleville, and--to speak of myself
--more at liberty than

Your unworthy servant,

Torna "Comtesse de Godollo."

P.S. For further information apply, without delay, to Monsieur du
Portail, householder, rue Honore-Chevalier, near the rue de la
Cassette, quartier Saint-Sulpice, by whom you are expected.

When he had read this letter the advocate of the poor took his head
in his hands; he saw nothing, heard nothing, thought nothing; he was
annihilated.

Several days were necessary to la Peyrade before he could even begin to
recover from the crushing blow which had struck him down. The shock
was terrible. Coming out of that golden dream which had shown him a
perspective of the future in so smiling an aspect, he found himself
fooled under conditions most cruel to his self-love, and to his
pretensions to depth and cleverness; irrevocably parted from the
Thuilliers; saddled with a hopeless debt of twenty-five thousand francs
to Madame Lambert, together with another of ten thousand to Brigitte,
which his dignity required him to pay with the least delay possible;
and, worst of all,--to complete his humiliation and his sense of
failure,--he felt that he was not cured of the passionate emotion he
had felt for this woman, the author of his great disaster, and the
instrument of his ruin.

Either this Delilah was a very great lady, sufficiently high in station
to allow herself such compromising caprices,--but even so, she would
scarcely have cared to play the role of a coquette in a vaudeville
where he himself played the part of ninny,--_or_ she was some noted
adventuress who was in the pay of this du Portail and the agent of his
singular matrimonial designs. Evil life or evil heart, these were the
only two verdicts to be pronounced on this dangerous siren, and in
either case, it would seem, she was not very deserving of the regrets of
her victim; nevertheless, he was conscious of feeling them. We must put
ourselves in the place of this son of Provence, this region of hot blood
and ardent heads, who, for the first time in his life finding himself
face to face with jewelled love in laces, believed he was t