g of the Chapuzots and Malaga to get him there. The count
would ask questions as to the small events of Marguerite's life, and
each time that he came he left two gold pieces of forty francs each on
the mantel-piece.

"He looks as if he didn't care to be here," said Madame Chapuzot.

"Yes," said Malaga, "the man's as cold as an icicle."

"But he's a good fellow all the same," cried Chapuzot, who was happy in
a new suit of clothes made of blue cloth, in which he looked like the
servant of some minister.

The sum which Paz deposited weekly on the mantel-piece, joined to
Malaga's meagre salary, gave her the means of sumptuous living compared
with her former poverty. Wonderful stories went the rounds of the Circus
about Malaga's good-luck. Her vanity increased the six thousand francs
which Paz had spent on her furniture to sixty thousand. According to
the clowns and the supers, Malaga was squandering money; and she now
appeared at the Circus wearing burnous and shawls and elegant scarfs.
The Pole, it was agreed on all sides, was the best sort of man a
circus-rider had ever encountered, not fault-finding nor jealous, and
willing to let Malaga do just what she liked.

"Some women have the luck of it," said Malaga's rival, "and I'm not one
of them,--though I do draw a third of the receipts."

Malaga wore pretty things, and occasionally "showed her head" (a term in
the lexicon of such characters) in the Bois, where the fashionable young
men of the day began to remark her. In fact, before long Malaga was
very much talked about in the questionable world of equivocal women, who
presently attacked her good fortune by calumnies. They said she was
a somnambulist, and the Pole was a magnetizer who was using her to
discover the philosopher's stone. Some even more envenomed scandals
drove her to a curiosity that was greater than Psyche's. She reported
them in tears to Paz.

"When I want to injure a woman," she said in conclusion, "I don't
calumniate her; I don't declare that some one magnetizes her to get
stones out of her, but I say plainly that she is humpbacked, and I prove
it. Why do you compromise me in this way?"

Paz maintained a cruel silence. Madame Chapuzot was not long in
discovering the name and title of Comte Paz; then she heard certain
positive facts at the hotel Laginski: for instance, that Paz was a
bachelor, and had never been known to have a daughter, alive or dead,
in Poland or in France. After that Malaga cou