did not receive the
letter in time, it mattered little! To Lissac,--and this was the main
consideration,--she intimated that she would call on him the next
morning at ten o'clock.

"Rendezvous box!" she said, as she slipped her two letters into the
letter-box. "This extreme comfort is very ironical."

She smiled as she thought how long it would take to count the number of
the little hands, some trembling, some bold, that had slipped into the
rectilinear mouth of the letter-box some little missive that was either
the foretaste or the postscript of adultery.

Then she went downstairs and rejoined Vaudrey, who was impatiently
tapping the floor of the carriage with his foot.

"I was a long time there, I ask your pardon," said Marianne.

"At any rate, I hope you have bought something that suited you?" asked
Vaudrey, who seemed to have caught a cold.

"Nothing at all. There is nothing in that store!"

Vaudrey was alarmed. Were they to visit one after the other all the
fancy goods stores?

Marianne took pity on him.

"Let us return, shall we?" she asked.

She called to the coachman: "Rue Prony!" while Sulpice, whom she
unwillingly took with her, though he wearily yawned, seized her hand and
said as he sneezed:

"Ah! how kind you are!"

The next day, Marianne rang the bell of Lissac's house in Rue d'Aumale,
a little before the appointed hour.

"Punctual as a creditor!" she thought.

She reached Guy's, ready for anything. She was very pale and charming in
her light costume, and she entered as one would go into a fray with
head high. She would not leave the place until she had recovered her
letters.

It was only for those scraps of paper that she again, as it were, bound
and tied herself to her past; she wished to cut herself away from it and
to tear them to pieces with her teeth. But what if Guy should refuse to
give them up to her? That could not be possible, although he was
sincerely attached to Rosas. Still, between gratitude to a woman and
duty to a friend, a man might hesitate, when he is a corrupted Parisian
like Lissac.

"His affection for Jose will not carry him to the length of forgetting
all that I have given him of myself!" Marianne thought.

Then shrugging her shoulders:

"After all, these men have such a freemasonry between them, as _he_
said!--And they speak of our fraternity, we women!--It is nothing
compared with theirs!"

Guy did not show any displeasure on hearing Mademoiselle Kayser