r the day; but would not the fear lie on me
every moment that I might not meet Finot in the evening? I felt too weak
to endure such fears in the midst of my felicity. Though I felt sure
that I should find nothing, I began a grand search through my room;
I looked for imaginary coins in the recesses of my mattress; I hunted
about everywhere--I even shook out my old boots. A nervous fever seized
me; I looked with wild eyes at the furniture when I had ransacked it
all. Will you understand, I wonder, the excitement that possessed
me when, plunged deep in the listlessness of despair, I opened my
writing-table drawer, and found a fair and splendid ten-franc piece
that shone like a rising star, new and sparkling, and slily hiding in
a cranny between two boards? I did not try to account for its previous
reserve and the cruelty of which it had been guilty in thus lying
hidden; I kissed it for a friend faithful in adversity, and hailed it
with a cry that found an echo, and made me turn sharply, to find Pauline
with a face grown white.

"'I thought,' she faltered, 'that you had hurt yourself! The man who
brought the letter----' (she broke off as if something smothered her
voice). 'But mother has paid him,' she added, and flitted away like a
wayward, capricious child. Poor little one! I wanted her to share in
my happiness. I seemed to have all the happiness in the world within
me just then; and I would fain have returned to the unhappy, all that I
felt as if I had stolen from them.

"The intuitive perception of adversity is sound for the most part; the
countess had sent away her carriage. One of those freaks that pretty
women can scarcely explain to themselves had determined her to go on
foot, by way of the boulevards, to the Jardin des Plantes.

"'It will rain,' I told her, and it pleased her to contradict me.

"As it fell out, the weather was fine while we went through the
Luxembourg; when we came out, some drops fell from a great cloud, whose
progress I had watched uneasily, and we took a cab. At the Museum I was
about to dismiss the vehicle, and Foedora (what agonies!) asked me not
to do so. But it was like a dream in broad daylight for me, to chat
with her, to wander in the Jardin des Plantes, to stray down the shady
alleys, to feel her hand upon my arm; the secret transports repressed
in me were reduced, no doubt, to a fixed and foolish smile upon my
lips; there was something unreal about it all. Yet in all her movements,