es in the direction of the poet, which stabbed like epigrams,
for each word revealed to her a triple insult.

"Monsieur Melchior!" said Modeste again in a voice that asserted its
right to be heard.

"What, mademoiselle?" demanded the poet.

Forced to rise, he remained standing half-way between the embroidery
frame, which was near a window, and the fireplace where Modeste was
seated with the Duchesse de Verneuil on a sofa. What bitter reflections
came into his ambitious mind, as he caught a glance from Eleonore. If
he obeyed Modeste all was over, and forever, between himself and his
protectress. Not to obey her was to avow his slavery, to lose the
chances of his twenty-five days of base manoeuvring, and to disregard
the plainest laws of decency and civility. The greater the folly, the
more imperatively the duchess exacted it. Modeste's beauty and money
thus pitted against Eleonore's rights and influence made this hesitation
between the man and his honor as terrible to witness as the peril of
a matador in the arena. A man seldom feels such palpitations as those
which now came near causing Canalis an aneurism, except, perhaps, before
the green table, where his fortune or his ruin is about to be decided.

"Mademoiselle d'Herouville hurried me from the carriage, and I left
behind me," said Modeste to Canalis, "my handkerchief--"

Canalis shrugged his shoulders significantly.

"And," continued Modeste, taking no notice of his gesture, "I had tied
into one corner of it the key of a desk which contains the fragment of
an important letter; have the kindness, Monsieur Melchior, to get it for
me."

Between an angel and a tiger equally enraged Canalis, who had turned
livid, no longer hesitated,--the tiger seemed to him the least dangerous
of the two; and he was about to do as he was told, and commit himself
irretrievably, when La Briere appeared at the door of the salon, seeming
to his anguished mind like the archangel Gabriel tumbling from heaven.

"Ernest, here, Mademoiselle de La Bastie wants you," said the poet,
hastily returning to his chair by the embroidery frame.

Ernest rushed to Modeste without bowing to any one; he saw only her,
took his commission with undisguised joy, and darted from the room, with
the secret approbation of every woman present.

"What an occupation for a poet!" said Modeste to Helene d'Herouville,
glancing toward the embroidery at which the duchess was now working
savagely.

"If you speak