ith a laugh as she feebly defended herself:

"Come--come--have done with it! Oh! the big boy!--You will leave nothing
for another time!"

He left the house, his head was swimming, and he was permeated with
strong odors. He flung to the coachman an address half-way to the
ministry.

"Place de la Madeleine."

He shut his eyes to picture Marianne.

As soon as she was alone, her lips curled as a smile of satisfied vanity
played over them. She began by reading the lines that he had so hastily
written: _I guarantee to Monsieur Adolphe Gochard a bill of exchange at
three months, if he agrees to advance that amount to Mademoiselle
Dujarrier who will hand it to Mademoiselle Marianne Kayser_.

"Well! the Dujarrier was right," she said; "a woman's scheming works
easier than a sinapism."

Then, after a slight toss of the head and still smiling, she opened one
of the drawers of the small Inaltia cabinet and slipped into it the
satin paper to which the minister had affixed his signature and which
she had carefully folded four times. She considered that autograph worth
a thousand times more gold than the few pieces that remained scattered
about the drawer, like so many waifs of luxury. Then, slowly returning
to her armchair, she sank into it, clasping her two hands behind her
head and gazing at the ceiling, her thoughts wandered in dreams--a crowd
of little ambitious thoughts passed through her brain like drifting
clouds across the sky--and while with the top of her foot she again beat
her nervous march on the hem of her petticoat, her lips, the lips whose
fever had been taken away by Vaudrey, still preserved the strange turn
of the corners that indicated the unsatiated person who sees, however,
his opportunity arrive.

She was as fully mistress of herself as Vaudrey was embarrassed and
unbalanced. He seemed to hear voices laughing and singing within him and
his brain was inflamed with joy. Before him opened the immense prospects
of his dreams. Glorious as it was to be all-powerful, it was better to
be loved. Everything whirled about within his brain, he thought he still
heard Denis Ramel talking to him, and in a twinkling, Marianne's smiling
face appeared, and with a kiss she interrupted the old journalist's
sallies, and Sulpice saw her, too, as it were half-fainting, through the
window of her fiacre, like a pastel half-hidden beneath the glass.

He was delighted to walk about for a moment when the carriage had set
him dow