ite violets, and among them two
budding roses, white also. During the whole night men and women were
complimenting the young girl on her bouquet. Angela could not but feel a
little grateful to her cousin who had procured this little triumph for
her vanity; and perhaps she would have thought more of him but for the
gallant persecutions of one of the bride's relatives who had danced
several times with her. He was a fair-haired youth, with a magnificent
moustache curled up at the ends, to hook innocent hearts. The bouquet
had been pulled to pieces by everybody; only two white roses were left.
The young man asked Angela for them; she refused--only to forget them
after the ball on a bench, whence the young fair-haired youth hastened
to take them.

At that moment it was fourteen degrees below freezing point in
Rodolphe's belvidere. He was leaning against his window looking out at
the lights in the ballroom, where his cousin Angela, who didn't care for
him, was dancing.

CHAPTER X

THE CAPE OF STORMS

In the opening month of each of the four seasons there are some
terrible epochs, usually about the 1st and the 15th. Rodolphe, who could
not witness the approach of one or the other of these two dates without
alarm, nicknamed them the Cape of Storms. On these mornings it is not
Aurora who opens the portals of the East, but creditors, landlords,
bailiffs and their kidney. The day begins with a shower of bills and
accounts and winds up with a hailstorm of protests. _Dies irae_.

Now one morning, it was the 15th of April, Rodolphe was peacefully
slumbering--and dreaming that one of his uncles had just bequeathed him
a whole province in Peru, the feminine inhabitants included.

Whilst he was wallowing in this imaginary Pacolus, the sound of a key
turning in the lock interrupted the heir presumptive just at the most
dazzling point of his golden dream.

Rodolphe sat up in bed, his eyes and mind yet heavy with slumber, and
looked about him.

He vaguely perceived standing in the middle of his room a man who had
just entered.

This early visitor bore a bag slung at his back and a large pocketbook
in his hand. He wore a cocked hat and a bluish-grey swallow-tailed coat
and seemed very much out of breath from ascending the five flights of
stairs. His manners were very affable and his steps sounded as
sonorously as that of a money-changer's counter on the march.

Rodolphe was alarmed for a moment, and at the sight of the