her patrons, she would be the rescuing angel who would dole
out a livelihood to the ruined family; she addressed herself as
"Madame la Comtesse" and "Madame la Marechale," courtesying in front
of a glass. Adeline and Hortense should end their days in struggling
with poverty, while she, a visitor at the Tuileries, would lord it in
the fashionable world.

A terrible disaster overthrew the old maid from the social heights
where she so proudly enthroned herself.

On the very day when the banns were first published, the Baron
received a second message from Africa. Another Alsatian arrived,
handed him a letter, after assuring himself that he spoke to Baron
Hulot, and after giving the Baron the address of his lodgings, bowed
himself out, leaving the great man stricken by the opening lines of
this letter:--

"DEAR NEPHEW,--You will receive this letter, by my calculations,
on the 7th of August. Supposing it takes you three days to send us
the help we need, and that it is a fortnight on the way here, that
brings us to the 1st of September.

"If you can act decisively within that time, you will have saved
the honor and the life of yours sincerely, Johann Fischer.

"This is what I am required to demand by the clerk you have made
my accomplice; for I am amenable, it would seem, to the law, at
the Assizes, or before a council of war. Of course, you understand
that Johann Fischer will never be brought to the bar of any
tribunal; he will go of his own act to appear at that of God.

"Your clerk seems to me a bad lot, quite capable of getting you
into hot water; but he is as clever as any rogue. He says the line
for you to take is to call out louder than any one, and to send
out an inspector, a special commissioner, to discover who is
really guilty, rake up abuses, and make a fuss, in short; but if
we stir up the struggle, who will stand between us and the law?

"If your commissioner arrives here by the 1st of September, and
you have given him your orders, sending by him two hundred
thousand francs to place in our storehouses the supplies we
profess to have secured in remote country places, we shall be
absolutely solvent and regarded as blameless. You can trust the
soldier who is the bearer of this letter with a draft in my name
on a house in Algiers. He is a trustworthy fellow, a relation of
mine, incapable of trying to find out what he is the bearer of. I
have taken measu