ghed scornfully, but gently; he had been a
great lion of the fashionable world before he came out to his Indigenes.

"The end of Cora! The end of her is--My good Alcide--that 'baby face'
has ruined more of us than would make up a battalion. She is so quiet,
so tender; smiles like an angel, glides like a fawn; is a little sad
too, the innocent dove; looks at you with eyes as clear as water, and
paf! before you know where you are, she has pillaged with both hands,
and you wake one fine morning bankrupt!"

"Why do you let her do it?" growled the vieille moustache, who had
served under Junot, when a little lad, and had scant knowledge of the
ways and wiles of the sirens of the Rue Breda.

"Ah, bah!" said the Colonel, with a shrug of his shoulders; "it is the
thing to be ruined by Cora."

Claude de Chanrellon sighed, stretching his handsome limbs, with the
sigh of recollection; for Paris had been a Paradise Lost to him for many
seasons, and he had had of late years but one solitary glimpse of it.
"It was Coeur d'Acier who was the rage in my time. She ate me up--that
woman--in three months. I had not a hundred francs left: she stripped
me as bare as a pigeon. Her passion was uncut emeralds just then. Well
uncut emeralds made an end of me, and sent me out here. Coeur d'Acier
was a wonderful woman!--and the chief wonder of her was, that she was as
ugly as sin."

"Ugly!"

"Ugly as sin! But she had the knack of making herself more charming than
Venus. How she did it nobody knew; but men left the prettiest creatures
for her; and she ruined us, I think, at the rate of a score a month."

"Like Loto," chimed in the Tirailleur. "Loto has not a shred of beauty.
She is a big, angular, raw-boned Normande, with a rough voice and
a villainous patois; but to be well with Loto is to have achieved
distinction at once. She will have nothing under the third order of
nobility; and Prince Paul shot the Duc de Var about her the other day.
She is a great creature, Loto; nobody knows her secret."

"Audacity, my friend! Always that!" said Chanrellon, with a twist of his
superb mustaches. "It is the finest quality out; nothing so sure to win.
Hallo! There is le beau corporal listening. Ah! Bel-a-faire-peur, you
fell, too, among the Lotos and the Coeurs d'Acier once, I will warrant."

The Chasseur, who was passing, paused and smiled a little, as he
saluted.

"Coeurs d'Acier are to be found in all ranks of the sex, monsieur, I
fancy!"

"Ba