ministry!" said the minister, as he got into his carriage.

He stretched himself out as if intoxicated. He looked at all the
carriages along the drive of the Bois de Boulogne, the high life was
already moving toward the Lake. In caleches, old ladies in mourning
appeared with pale nuns, and old men with red decorations stretched out
under lap-robes. Pretty girls with pale countenances pierced with bright
eyes, like fragments of coal in flour, showed themselves at the doors of
the coupes, close to the muzzles of pink-nosed, well-combed,
white-haired little dogs. Vaudrey strove to find Marianne amid that
throng, to see her again. She was far away.

He thought only of her, while his coupe went down the Avenue des
Champs-Elysees, bustling with noise and movement and flooded with light.
The coachman took a side street and the carriage disappeared through an
open gateway between two high posts surmounted by two lamps, in a
passage leading to a huge white mansion whose slate roof was ablaze
with sunlight. An infantry soldier in red trousers, with a shako on his
head, mounted guard and stood motionless beside a brown-painted
sentry-box that stood at the right. Above the gateways a new tricolor
flag, in honor of the new ministry, waved in the sunshine.

Against the ministerial edifice were two gas fixtures bearing two huge
capital letters: R.F., ready to be illuminated on important reception
nights.

Two lackeys hastily opening the door, rushed up to the halted carriage
and stood at its door.

"Adieu! Marianne," thought Sulpice, as he placed his foot in the
antechamber of this vast mansion as cold as a tomb.

* * * * *

_She was still mechanically throwing crumbs of bread around her,
which were eagerly snatched at by the many-colored ducks_ ...

[Illustration: VAUDREY MEETS MARIANNE IN THE BOIS]

VIII

Marianne Kayser was superstitious. She believed that in the case of
compromised affairs, salvation appeared at the supreme moment of playing
the very last stake. She had always rebounded, for her part,--like a
rubber-ball, she said--at the moment that she found herself overthrown,
and more than half conquered. Fate had given some cause for her
superstitious ideas. She thought herself lost, and was weary of
searching, of living, in fact, when suddenly Monsieur de Rosas reached
Paris from the other end of the world. That was salvation.

The duke did not prove very difficult to ens