the downfall of all her splendors she remembered the man
who had first initiated her into fashionable life, who had given her
lessons in dancing and deportment when she was a little girl, laughed at
her pretty ways, and taught her to look upon herself as beautiful before
any one had ever told her that she was so. Something told her that that
fallen star would take her part against all others. She entered one of
the carriages standing at the gate and ordered the driver to take her to
the actor's lodgings on the Boulevard Beaumarchais.

For some time past Mamma Delobelle had been making straw hats for
export-a dismal trade if ever there was one, which brought in barely two
francs fifty for twelve hours' work.

And Delobelle continued to grow fat in the same degree that his "sainted
wife" grew thin. At the very moment when some one knocked hurriedly at
his door he had just discovered a fragrant soup 'au fromage', which
had been kept hot in the ashes on the hearth. The actor, who had been
witnessing at Beaumarchais some dark-browed melodrama drenched with gore
even to the illustrated headlines of its poster, was startled by that
knock at such an advanced hour.

"Who is there?" he asked in some alarm.

"It is I, Sidonie. Open the door quickly."

She entered the room, shivering all over, and, throwing aside her wrap,
went close to the stove where the fire was almost extinct. She began to
talk at once, to pour out the wrath that had been stifling her for an
hour, and while she was describing the scene in the factory, lowering
her voice because of Madame Delobelle, who was asleep close by, the
magnificence of her costume in that poor, bare, fifth floor, the
dazzling whiteness of her disordered finery amid the heaps of coarse
hats and the wisps of straw strewn about the room, all combined to
produce the effect of a veritable drama, of one of those terrible
upheavals of life when rank, feelings, fortunes are suddenly jumbled
together.

"Oh! I never shall return home. It is all over. Free--I am free!"

"But who could have betrayed you to your husband?" asked the actor.

"It was Frantz! I am sure it was Frantz. He wouldn't have believed it
from anybody else. Only last evening a letter came from Egypt. Oh!
how he treated me before that woman! To force me to kneel! But I'll be
revenged. Luckily I took something to revenge myself with before I came
away."

And the smile of former days played about the corners of her pale li