t verre, and there he found
the two colleagues in the extinct Council of Ten, Paul Grimm and Edgar
Ferrier. With the last of these revolutionists Gustave had become
intimately lie. They wrote in the same journal, and he willingly
accepted a distraction from his self-conflict which Edgar offered him in
a dinner at the cafe Riche, which still offered its hospitalities at no
exorbitant price. At this repast, as the drink circulated, Gustave waxed
confidential. He longed, poor youth, for an adviser. Could he marry a
girl who had been a ballet-dancer, and who had come into an unexpected
heritage? "Es-tu fou d'en douter?" cried Edgar. "What a sublime occasion
to manifest thy scorn of the miserable banalities of the bourgeoisie! It
will but increase thy moral power over the people. And then think of the
money. What an aid to the cause! What a capital for the launch!--journal
all thine own! Besides, when our principles triumph--as triumph they
must--what would be marriage but a brief and futile ceremony, to be
broken the moment thou hast cause to complain of thy wife or chafe at
the bond? Only get the dot into thine own hands. L'amour passe--reste la
cassette."

Though there was enough of good in the son of Madame Rameau to revolt at
the precise words in which the counsel was given, still, as the fumes of
the punch yet more addled his brains, the counsel itself was acceptable;
and in that sort of maddened fury which intoxication produces in some
excitable temperaments, as Gustave reeled home that night leaning on
the arm of stouter Edgar Ferrier, he insisted on going out of his way
to pass the house in which Isaura lived, and, pausing under her window,
gasped out some verses of a wild song, then much in vogue among the
votaries of Felix Pyat, in which everything that existent society deems
sacred was reviled in the grossest ribaldry. Happily Isaura's ear heard
it not. The girl was kneeling by her bedside absorbed in prayer.

CHAPTER XII.

Three days after the evening thus spent by Gustave Rameau, Isaura was
startled by a visit from M. de Mauleon. She had not seen him since the
commencement of the siege, and she did not recognise him at first glance
in his military uniform.

"I trust you will pardon my intrusion, Mademoiselle," he said, in the
low sweet voice habitual to him in his gentler moods, "but I thought
it became me to announce to you the decease of one who, I fear, did not
discharge with much kindness the duti