here is one who will be equipped in
good time!"

Porthos, yielding to the pressure of the arm of the procurator's wife,
as a bark yields to the rudder, arrived at the cloister St. Magloire--a
little-frequented passage, enclosed with a turnstile at each end. In the
daytime nobody was seen there but mendicants devouring their crusts, and
children at play.

"Ah, Monsieur Porthos," cried the procurator's wife, when she was
assured that no one who was a stranger to the population of the locality
could either see or hear her, "ah, Monsieur Porthos, you are a great
conqueror, as it appears!"

"I, madame?" said Porthos, drawing himself up proudly; "how so?"

"The signs just now, and the holy water! But that must be a princess, at
least--that lady with her Negro boy and her maid!"

"My God! Madame, you are deceived," said Porthos; "she is simply a
duchess."

"And that running footman who waited at the door, and that carriage with
a coachman in grand livery who sat waiting on his seat?"

Porthos had seen neither the footman nor the carriage, but with the eye
of a jealous woman, Mme. Coquenard had seen everything.

Porthos regretted that he had not at once made the lady of the red
cushion a princess.

"Ah, you are quite the pet of the ladies, Monsieur Porthos!" resumed the
procurator's wife, with a sigh.

"Well," responded Porthos, "you may imagine, with the physique with
which nature has endowed me, I am not in want of good luck."

"Good Lord, how quickly men forget!" cried the procurator's wife,
raising her eyes toward heaven.

"Less quickly than the women, it seems to me," replied Porthos; "for
I, madame, I may say I was your victim, when wounded, dying, I was
abandoned by the surgeons. I, the offspring of a noble family, who
placed reliance upon your friendship--I was near dying of my wounds at
first, and of hunger afterward, in a beggarly inn at Chantilly, without
you ever deigning once to reply to the burning letters I addressed to
you."

"But, Monsieur Porthos," murmured the procurator's wife, who began to
feel that, to judge by the conduct of the great ladies of the time, she
was wrong.

"I, who had sacrificed for you the Baronne de--"

"I know it well."

"The Comtesse de--"

"Monsieur Porthos, be generous!"

"You are right, madame, and I will not finish."

"But it was my husband who would not hear of lending."

"Madame Coquenard," said Porthos, "remember the first letter you wrote
me, and which