rew back abruptly. A valet entered with a dignified air and
ceremoniously announced that breakfast was served.

Vaudrey ate without appetite. Adrienne watched him tenderly, her eyes
were kind and gentle. How nervous he was and quickly disturbed! Truly,
Warcolier's appointment was not worth his giving himself the least
anxiety about.

She was going to speak to him about it. Vaudrey imposed silence by a
sign. The motionless domestics were listening.

Like Sulpice, Adrienne suffered the annoyance of a constant
surveillance. She was hungry when she sat down to table, but her
appetite had vanished. The viands were served cold, brought on plates
decorated with various designs and marked with the initials of Louis
Philippe, L.P., intertwined, or with the monogram of the Empire, N.; the
gilt was worn off, the fillets of gold half obliterated: a service of
Sevres that had been used everywhere, in imperial dwellings, national
palaces, and was at last sent to the various ministries as the remnant
of the tables of banished sovereigns.

Instead of eating, Adrienne musingly looked at the decorations. It
seemed to her that she was in a gloomy restaurant where the badly served
dishes banished her appetite. Sulpice, sad himself, scarcely spoke and
in mute preoccupation, in turn confused the shrewd, sly Granet, the
intriguing Warcolier, and Marianne Kayser, whose image never left him.
He was discontented with himself and excited by the persistency with
which the image of this woman haunted him.

In vain did Adrienne smile and seek to divert him from the thoughts that
besieged him--she was herself in a melancholy mood, without knowing why,
and her endeavors were but wasted; if he abandoned the train of his
reflections, it was merely to express a thought in rapid tones, and he
seemed momentarily to shake off his torpor; he replied to his wife's
forced smile by a mechanical grimace, and immediately relapsed into his
nervously silent state.

In the hours of anxious struggle, she had often seen him thus, hence she
was not alarmed. If she had been in her own home, instead of occupying
this strange mansion, she would have rushed to him, and seated on his
knees, taken his burning head between her little hands and said: "Come
now! what ails you? what is the matter? Tell me everything so that,
child as I may be, I may comfort my big boy."

But there, still in the presence of those people, always in full view,
she dared not. She carefully a