vapory, impalpable cloud. The arms are to be
absolutely bare, as I already told you. On each shoulder there must be a
simple knot, showing the upper part of the arm. Of what is the knot to
be? I'm still undecided--I need to think it over--till to-morrow,
madame, till to-morrow."

Mme. Derline came back the next day, and the next, and every day till
the day before the famous Thursday; and each time that she came back,
while awaiting her turn to try on, she ordered dresses, very simple
ones, but yet costing from seven to eight hundred francs each.

And that was not all. On the day of her first visit to M. Arthur, when
Mme. Derline came out of the great house, she was
broken-hearted--positively broken-hearted--at the sight of her brougham;
it really did make a pitiful appearance among all the stylish carriages
which were waiting in three rows and taking up half the street. It was
the brougham of her late mother-in-law, and it still rolled through the
streets of Paris after fifteen years' service. Mme. Derline got into the
woe-begone brougham to drive straight to a very well-known
carriage-maker, and that evening, cleverly seizing the psychological
moment, she explained to M. Derline that she had seen a certain little
black coupe lined with blue satin that would frame delightfully her new
dresses.

The coupe was bought the next day by M. Derline, who also was beginning
fully to realize the extent of his new duties. But the next day it was
discovered that it was impossible to harness to that jewel of a coupe
the old horse who had pulled the old carriage, and no less impossible to
put on the box the old coachman who drove the old horse.

This is how on Thursday, April 25th, at half-past ten in the evening, a
very pretty chestnut mare, driven by a very correct English coachman,
took M. and Mme. Derline to the Palmer's. They still lacked something--a
little groom to sit beside the English coachman. But a certain amount of
discretion had to be employed. The most beautiful woman in Paris
intended to wait ten days before asking for the little groom.

While she was going up-stairs at the Palmer's, she distinctly felt her
heart beat like the strokes of a hammer. She was going to play a
decisive game. She knew that the Palmers had been going everywhere,
saying, "Come on Thursday; we will show you Mme. Derline, the most
beautiful woman in Paris." Curiosity as well as jealousy had been well
awakened.

She entered, and from the