way in a panic when she heard her maid knocking gently at her
door.

"Madame Camusot," said the woman, "on business of the greatest
importance to you, Madame la Duchesse."

Diane sprang to her feet in terror.

"Oh!" cried she, looking at Amelie, who had assumed a duly condoling
air, "I guess it all--my letters! It is about my letters. Oh, my
letters, my letters!"

She sank on to a couch. She remembered now how, in the extravagance of
her passion, she had answered Lucien in the same vein, had lauded the
man's poetry as he has sung the charms of the woman, and in what a
strain!

"Alas, yes, madame, I have come to save what is dearer to you than
life--your honor. Compose yourself and get dressed, we must go to the
Duchesse de Grandlieu; happily for you, you are not the only person
compromised."

"But at the Palais, yesterday, Leontine burned, I am told, all the
letters found at poor Lucien's."

"But, madame, behind Lucien there was Jacques Collin!" cried the
magistrate's wife. "You always forget that horrible companionship which
beyond question led to that charming and lamented young man's end. That
Machiavelli of the galleys never loses his head! Monsieur Camusot is
convinced that the wretch has in some safe hiding-place all the most
compromising letters written by you ladies to his----"

"His friend," the Duchess hastily put in. "You are right, my child.
We must hold council at the Grandlieus'. We are all concerned in this
matter, and Serizy happily will lend us his aid."

Extreme peril--as we have observed in the scenes in the
Conciergerie--has a hold over the soul not less terrible than that of
powerful reagents over the body. It is a mental Voltaic battery. The
day, perhaps, is not far off when the process shall be discovered
by which feeling is chemically converted into a fluid not unlike the
electric fluid.

The phenomena were the same in the convict and the Duchess. This
crushed, half-dying woman, who had not slept, who was so particular over
her dressing, had recovered the strength of a lioness at bay, and the
presence of mind of a general under fire. Diane chose her gown and got
through her dressing with the alacrity of a grisette who is her own
waiting-woman. It was so astounding, that the lady's-maid stood for a
moment stock-still, so greatly was she surprised to see her mistress
in her shift, not ill pleased perhaps to let the judge's wife discern
through the thin cloud of lawn a form as white an