rder.

"Assuredly," she admitted, complacently. "Has not France produced a
Jeanne d'Arc and a Duchesse de Berri? It was not from his father, at all
events, that he inherited his courage. For he was a poltroon, that man.
Yes, my dear Abbe, let us be honest, and look at life as it is. He was
a poltroon, and I thought I loved him--for two or three days only,
however. And I was a child then. I was beautiful."

"Was?" echoed the Abbe, reproachfully.

"Silence, wicked one! And you a priest."

"Even an ecclesiastic, Madame, may have eyes," he said, darkly, as he
snuffed a candle and, subsequently, gave himself a mechanical thump on
the chest, in the region of the heart.

"Then they should wear blinkers, like a horse," said Madame, severely,
as if wearied by an admiration so universal that it palled.

At this moment, Albert de Chantonnay entered the room. He was enveloped
in a long black cloak, which he threw off his shoulders and cast
over the back of a chair, not without an obvious appreciation of its
possibilities of the picturesque. He looked round the room with a mild
eye, which refused to lend itself to mystery or a martial ruthlessness.

He was a young man with a very thin neck, and the whiskers, of which his
mother made complaint, were scarcely visible by the light of the Abbe's
candles.

"Good!" he said, in a thin tenor voice. "We are in time."

He came forward to the table, with long, nervous strides. He was not
exactly impressive, but his manner gave the assurance of a distinct
earnestness of purpose. The majority of us are unfortunately situated
toward the world, as regards personal appearance. Many could pass for
great if their physical proportions were less mean. There are thousands
of worthy and virtuous young men who never receive their due in social
life because they have red hair or stand four-feet-six high, or happen
to be the victim of an inefficient dentist. The world, it would seem,
does not want virtue or solid worth. It prefers appearance to either.
Albert de Chantonnay would, for instance, have carried twice the weight
in Royalist councils if his neck had been thicker.

He nodded to the Abbe.

"I received your message," he said, in the curt manner of the man whose
life is in his hand, or is understood, in French theatrical circles, to
be thus uncomfortably situated. "The letter?"

"It is here, Monsieur Albert," replied the Abbe, who was commonplace,
and could not see himself as he wished o