w broken; and when the quadrille was concluded, and
Rochebriant led the fair Valerie back to her father's side, she felt
as if she had been listening to the music of the spheres, and that the
music had now suddenly stopped. Alain, alas for her! was under no such
pleasing illusion. Her talk had seemed to him artless indeed, but
very insipid, compared with the brilliant conversation of the wedded
Parisiennes with whom he more habitually danced; and it was with rather
a sensation of relief that he made his parting bow, and receded into the
crowd of bystanders.

Meanwhile De Mauleon had quitted the assemblage, walking slowly through
the deserted streets towards his apartment. The civilities he had met
at Louvier's dinner-party, and the marked distinction paid to him by
kinsmen of rank and position so unequivocal as Alain and Enguerrand,
had softened his mood and cheered his spirits. He had begun to question
himself whether a fair opening to his political ambition was really
forbidden to him under the existent order of things, whether it
necessitated the employment of such dangerous tools as those to which
anger and despair had reconciled his intellect. But the pointed way in
which he had been shunned or slighted by the two men who belonged to
political life--two men who in youth had looked up to himself, and
whose dazzling career of honours was identified with the Imperial
system--reanimated his fiercer passions and his more perilous designs.
The frigid accost of Hennequin more especially galled him; it wounded
not only his pride but his heart; it had the venom of ingratitude, and
it is the peculiar privilege of ingratitude to wound hearts that have
learned to harden themselves to the hate or contempt of men to whom
no services have been rendered. In some private affair concerning his
property, De Mauleon had had occasion to consult Hennequin, then a
rising young avocat. Out of that consultation a friendship had sprung
up, despite the differing habits and social grades of the two men. One
day, calling on Hennequin, he found him in a state of great nervous
excitement. The avocat had received a public insult in the salon of a
noble, to whom De Mauleon had introduced him, from a man who pretended
to the hand of a young lady to whom Hennequin was attached, and indeed
almost affianced. The man was a notorious spadassin,--a duellist little
less renowned for skill in all weapons than De Mauleon himself. The
affair had been such th