nswer me as to all this, for perhaps your long elegy of a
wife no longer allows you your liberty as she did. I am told she
is still so handsome that you might play me false, you are such a
gay dog! Burn this note; I am suspicious of every one."

Hulot wrote this scrap in reply:

"MY LOVE,--As I have told you, my wife has not for five-and-twenty
years interfered with my pleasures. For you I would give up a
hundred Adelines.--I will be in the Crevel sanctum at nine this
evening awaiting my divinity. Oh that your clerk might soon die!
We should part no more. And this is the dearest wish of

"YOUR HECTOR."

That evening the Baron told his wife that he had business with the
Minister at Saint-Cloud, that he would come home at about four or five
in the morning; and he went to the Rue du Dauphin. It was towards the
end of the month of June.

Few men have in the course of their life known really the dreadful
sensation of going to their death; those who have returned from the
foot of the scaffold may be easily counted. But some have had a vivid
experience of it in dreams; they have gone through it all, to the
sensation of the knife at their throat, at the moment when waking
and daylight come to release them.--Well, the sensation to which the
Councillor of State was a victim at five in the morning in Crevel's
handsome and elegant bed, was immeasurably worse than that of feeling
himself bound to the fatal block in the presence of ten thousand
spectators looking at you with twenty thousand sparks of fire.

Valerie was asleep in a graceful attitude. She was lovely, as a woman
is who is lovely enough to look so even in sleep. It is art invading
nature; in short, a living picture.

In his horizontal position the Baron's eyes were but three feet above
the floor. His gaze, wandering idly, as that of a man who is just awake
and collecting his ideas, fell on a door painted with flowers by Jan, an
artist disdainful of fame. The Baron did not indeed see twenty thousand
flaming eyes, like the man condemned to death; he saw but one, of which
the shaft was really more piercing than the thousands on the Public
Square.

Now this sensation, far rarer in the midst of enjoyment even than
that of a man condemned to death, was one for which many a splenetic
Englishman would certainly pay a high price. The Baron lay there,
horizontal still, and literally bathed in cold sweat. He tried to doubt
the fact; but this murderous ey