following laconic epistle came to him one day through the post:

"Monsieur le Duc--I, if I were in your place, would watch my wife."

It was only an anonymous letter, but Martial's blood mounted to his
forehead.

"Can it be that she has a lover?" he thought.

Then reflecting on his own conduct toward his wife since their marriage,
he said to himself:

"And if she has, have I any right to complain? Did I not tacitly give
her back her liberty?"

He was greatly troubled, and yet he would not have degraded himself
so much as to play the spy, had it not been for one of those trifling
circumstances which so often decide a man's destiny.

He was returning from a ride on horseback one morning about eleven
o'clock, and he was not thirty paces from the Hotel de Sairmeuse when
he saw a lady hurriedly emerge from the house. She was very plainly
dressed--entirely in black--but her whole appearance was strikingly that
of the duchess.

"It is certainly my wife; but why is she dressed in such a fashion?" he
thought.

Had he been on foot he would certainly have entered the house; as it
was, he slowly followed Mme. Blanche, who was going up the Rue Crenelle.
She walked very quickly, and without turning her head, and kept her face
persistently shrouded in a very thick veil.

When she reached the Rue Taranne, she threw herself into one of the
_fiacres_ at the carriage-stand.

The coachman came to the door to speak to her; then nimbly sprang upon
the box, and gave his bony horses one of those cuts of the whip that
announce a princely _pourboire_.

The carriage had already turned the corner of the Rue du Dragon, and
Martial, ashamed and irresolute, had not moved from the place where he
had stopped his horse, just around the corner of the Rue Saint Pares.

Not daring to admit his suspicions, he tried to deceive himself.

"Nonsense!" he thought, giving the reins to his horse, "what do I risk
in advancing? The carriage is a long way off by this time, and I shall
not overtake it."

He did overtake it, however, on reaching the intersection of the
Croix-Rouge, where there was, as usual, a crowd of vehicles.

It was the same _fiacre_; Martial recognized it by its green body, and
its wheels striped with white.

Emerging from the crowd of carriages, the driver whipped up his horses,
and it was at a gallop that they flew up the Rue du Vieux Columbier--the
narrowest street that borders the Place Saint Sulpice--and gained the