moment."

"She has come!" said Caillette, turning pale and looking up at Fanfar,
who was arranging an iron chain, and did not seem to have heard.

And the clown continued to say;

"Come in, gentlemen, come in!"

And the peasants, elbowing each other, said, "Oh! we must see this; it
won't kill us for once."

CHAPTER XVII.

ROBECCAL'S IDEA.

The frequenters of the theatres and circuses of the present day would
consider this establishment of Gudel's very modest, with its single
gallery, a little red serge, and its shabby velvet curtain. There was an
orchestra, but what an orchestra! All the actors when not occupied on
the stage assisted in it. Gudel at intervals played the trombone. The
gallery was crowded; so crowded that, from time to time, there were
ominous crackings, but the people in their excitement did not notice
this.

But a great silence fell on the spectators, when Irene de Salves
entered. Erect and haughty, she moved through the crowd, with the
slightest possible inclination of the head in apology for disturbing
them.

A word here in regard to this young lady. She was looked upon as a very
eccentric person. Her father had followed Bonaparte's fortunes, and had
fallen in Russia, leaving his widow sole guardian of this girl, then
only four years of age.

The Countess, broken-hearted at her loss, shut herself up in the
chateau, and devoted herself to her daughter. Irene seemed to have
inherited her father's adventurous spirit, and her mother encouraged
rather than restrained it, so great was her joy in the resemblance. She
had his exuberant vitality, his contempt for danger, and his pride of
race. Irene, possessing an enormous fortune and accustomed to the
indulgence of every caprice, soon began to look upon herself as of
superior clay to these peasants who doffed their hats to her as she
passed. She believed in the great power of money, and the Countess
encouraged this belief. But illness came, and the Countess was confined
to her sofa by paralysis. She lived now only for her daughter, and it
was the one bright spot in her day when Irene rushed in, bringing with
her fresh air and the sweet scents of the woods.

The child had become a woman, a woman full of contradictions. She was by
turns charitable or pitiless, benevolent or disdainful. Sometimes, gay
as a child, she rode all over the country--other days she hid herself in
the woods or climbed to some inaccessible height, and there, with