"

"Well," said Valerie, "but it is quite likely that the Baron and I may
be on distant terms before long."

"Madame Olivier is the only person who can make Hortense demand to see
the letter," said Lisbeth. "And you must send her to the Rue
Saint-Dominique before she goes on to the studio."

"Our beauty will be at home, no doubt," said Valerie, ringing for
Reine to call up Madame Olivier.

Ten minutes after the despatch of this fateful letter, Baron Hulot
arrived. Madame Marneffe threw her arms round the old man's neck with
kittenish impetuosity.

"Hector, you are a father!" she said in his ear. "That is what comes
of quarreling and making friends again----"

Perceiving a look of surprise, which the Baron did not at once
conceal, Valerie assumed a reserve which brought the old man to
despair. She made him wring the proofs from her one by one. When
conviction, led on by vanity, had at last entered his mind, she
enlarged on Monsieur Marneffe's wrath.

"My dear old veteran," said she, "you can hardly avoid getting your
responsible editor, our representative partner if you like, appointed
head-clerk and officer of the Legion of Honor, for you really have
done for the poor man, he adores his Stanislas, the little monstrosity
who is so like him, that to me he is insufferable. Unless you prefer
to settle twelve hundred francs a year on Stanislas--the capital to be
his, and the life-interest payable to me, of course--"

"But if I am to settle securities, I would rather it should be on my
own son, and not on the monstrosity," said the Baron.

This rash speech, in which the words "my own son" came out as full as
a river in flood, was, by the end of the hour, ratified as a formal
promise to settle twelve hundred francs a year on the future boy. And
this promise became, on Valerie's tongue and in her countenance, what
a drum is in the hands of a child; for three weeks she played on it
incessantly.

At the moment when Baron Hulot was leaving the Rue Vanneau, as happy
as a man who after a year of married life still desires an heir,
Madame Olivier had yielded to Hortense, and given up the note she was
instructed to give only into the Count's own hands. The young wife
paid twenty francs for that letter. The wretch who commits suicide
must pay for the opium, the pistol, the charcoal.

Hortense read and re-read the note; she saw nothing but this sheet of
white paper streaked with black lines; the universe held for her
noth