roused one equally defiant in her, and
when they came in contact it was the collision of flint and steel.
Leonie often carried her point against her father, and he admired her
only the more for it. The contests were quick and sharp--not very
frequent, but very unpleasant to Madame Regnault. She grew thin and pale
and spiritless. She was not yet thirty, and she had aged by half a score
of years in the year and a half of her marriage.

Her mother, Madame Dumesnil, was indignant at what she considered the
colonel's neglect of his wife, and mentally threatened to give him "a
piece of her mind." She had not long to wait for an occasion.

"I am sorry to see Clemence looking so ill," said she to him as he
entered his wife's dressing-room one day a little before breakfast--that
is to say, about noon.

"I had not noticed that she was ailing," he rejoined with a quick glance
at his wife.

"It is well that somebody has eyes," continued Madame Dumesnil. "I did
not expect that my daughter was to become a governess when she married
you. Her previous life had not prepared her for such arduous duties."

"My wife does not complain," said the colonel haughtily.

"Clemence complain! She would not complain if she suffered martyrdom."
Madame Regnault looked imploringly at her mother, but she went on more
sternly than before: "If Clemence had a spark of spirit she would never
have had Leonie in the house. It is a shame for her to be made a slave
to the opera-singer's girl, and I am not the only one who thinks so."

"Pardon me, madame," responded her son-in-law, "the conversation is too
exciting for me. I have the honor to wish you a good-morning;" and he
bowed himself out with the most exasperating courtesy.

"Oh, mother, what have you done?" cried Madame Regnault, trembling and
tearful. "How could you make him so angry?"

"How _could_ I, indeed! I wish I were his wife a little while: he
wouldn't find it so easy to tyrannize over me. I don't know where you
got your disposition from: you didn't take it from me, that's certain."

"Jacques," said Colonel Regnault to the porter as he left the house,
"when Madame Dumesnil calls to see your mistress hereafter, let me know
it, and remember that I am never at home."

Leonie, though she felt a certain hardness in the manner of Madame
Dumesnil when she happened to meet her, was wholly unaware of what was
passing in the heart of Madame Regnault, who had a genuine sympathetic
interest in th