your lover before you? Is he never to come first and above all things
else in your heart? In time past you put social success, yourself,
heaven knows what, before him; now it is God, it is the welfare of my
soul! In Sister Theresa I find the Duchess over again, ignorant of
the happiness of love, insensible as ever, beneath the semblance of
sensibility. You do not love me; you have never loved me----"

"Oh, my brother----!"

"You do not wish to leave this tomb. You love my soul, do you say?
Very well, through you it will be lost forever. I shall make away with
myself----"

"Mother!" Sister Theresa called aloud in Spanish, "I have lied to you;
this man is my lover!"

The curtain fell at once. The General, in his stupor, scarcely heard the
doors within as they clanged.

"Ah! she loves me still!" he cried, understanding all the sublimity of
that cry of hers. "She loves me still. She must be carried off...."

The General left the island, returned to headquarters, pleaded
ill-health, asked for leave of absence, and forthwith took his departure
for France.

And now for the incidents which brought the two personages in this Scene
into their present relation to each other.

The thing known in France as the Faubourg Saint-Germain is neither a
Quarter, nor a sect, nor an institution, nor anything else that admits
of a precise definition. There are great houses in the Place Royale, the
Faubourg Saint-Honore, and the Chaussee d'Antin, in any one of which you
may breathe the same atmosphere of Faubourg Saint-Germain. So, to begin
with, the whole Faubourg is not within the Faubourg. There are men and
women born far enough away from its influences who respond to them and
take their place in the circle; and again there are others, born within
its limits, who may yet be driven forth forever. For the last forty
years the manners, and customs, and speech, in a word, the tradition of
the Faubourg Saint-Germain, has been to Paris what the Court used to be
in other times; it is what the Hotel Saint-Paul was to the fourteenth
century; the Louvre to the fifteenth; the Palais, the Hotel Rambouillet,
and the Place Royale to the sixteenth; and lastly, as Versailles was to
the seventeenth and the eighteenth.

Just as the ordinary workaday Paris will always centre about some point;
so, through all periods of history, the Paris of the nobles and
the upper classes converges towards some particular spot. It is a
periodically recurr