aithful watchdog, understood
its meaning. It was, we must remark, an affair of two seconds; but to
describe the tempest it roused in the captain's soul would take far too
much space in this brief history.

"What!" he said to himself, "do the aunt and uncle think I might be
loved? Then my happiness only depends on my own audacity! But Adam--"

Ideal love and desire clashed with gratitude and friendship, all equally
powerful, and, for a moment, love prevailed. The lover would have his
day. Paz became brilliant, he tried to please, he told the story of the
Polish insurrection in noble words, being questioned about it by the
diplomatist. By the end of dinner Paz saw Clementine hanging upon
his lips and regarding him as a hero, forgetting that Adam too, after
sacrificing a third of his vast fortune, had been an exile. At nine
o'clock, after coffee had been served, Madame de Serizy kissed her niece
on the forehead, pressed her hand, and went away, taking Adam with her
and leaving the Marquis de Ronquerolles and the Marquis du Rouvre, who
soon followed. Paz and Clementine were alone together.

"I will leave you now, madame," said Thaddeus. "You will of course
rejoin them at the Opera?"

"No," she answered, "I don't like dancing, and they give an odious
ballet to-night 'La Revolte au Serail.'"

There was a moment's silence.

"Two years ago Adam would not have gone to the Opera without me," said
Clementine, not looking at Paz.

"He loves you madly," replied Thaddeus.

"Yes, and because he loves me madly he is all the more likely not to
love me to-morrow," said the countess.

"How inexplicable Parisian women are!" exclaimed Thaddeus. "When they
are loved to madness they want to be loved reasonably: and when they are
loved reasonably they reproach a man for not loving them at all."

"And they are quite right. Thaddeus," she went on, smiling, "I know
Adam well; I am not angry with him; he is volatile and above all grand
seigneur. He will always be content to have me as his wife and he will
never oppose any of my tastes, but--"

"Where is the marriage in which there are no 'buts'?" said Thaddeus,
gently, trying to give another direction to Clementine's mind.

The least presuming of men might well have had the thought which came
near rendering this poor lover beside himself; it was this: "If I do not
tell her now that I love her I am a fool," he kept saying to himself.

Neither spoke; and there came between the pair on