ousand francs were to be had
free of interest for a year!--I said to myself, 'Hortense will be none
the wiser; I will go and get them.'

"Then the woman asked me to dinner through my father-in-law, giving me
to understand that Lisbeth had spoken of the matter, and I should have
the money. Between Hortense's despair on one hand, and the dinner on
the other, I could not hesitate.--That is all.

"What! could Hortense, at four-and-twenty, lovely, pure, and virtuous,
and all my pride and glory, imagine that, when I have never left her
since we married, I could now prefer--what?--a tawny, painted, ruddled
creature?" said he, using the vulgar exaggeration of the studio to
convince his wife by the vehemence that women like.

"Oh! if only your father had ever spoken so----!" cried the Baroness.

Hortense threw her arms round her husband's neck.

"Yes, that is what I should have done," said her mother. "Wenceslas,
my dear fellow, your wife was near dying of it," she went on very
seriously. "You see how well she loves you. And, alas--she is yours!"

She sighed deeply.

"He may make a martyr of her, or a happy woman," thought she to
herself, as every mother thinks when she sees her daughter married.
--"It seems to me," she said aloud, "that I am miserable enough to
hope to see my children happy."

"Be quite easy, dear mamma," said Wenceslas, only too glad to see this
critical moment end happily. "In two months I shall have repaid that
dreadful woman. How could I help it," he went on, repeating this
essentially Polish excuse with a Pole's grace; "there are times when a
man would borrow of the Devil.--And, after all, the money belongs to
the family. When once she had invited me, should I have got the money
at all if I had responded to her civility with a rude refusal?"

"Oh, mamma, what mischief papa is bringing on us!" cried Hortense.

The Baroness laid her finger on her daughter's lips, aggrieved by this
complaint, the first blame she had ever uttered of a father so
heroically screened by her mother's magnanimous silence.

"Now, good-bye, my children," said Madame Hulot. "The storm is over.
But do not quarrel any more."

When Wenceslas and his wife returned to their room after letting out
the Baroness, Hortense said to her husband:

"Tell me all about last evening."

And she watched his face all through the narrative, interrupting him
by the questions that crowd on a wife's mind in such circumstances.
The story mad