onage, and behold my gentlewoman again! Human endurance
will not go too far, and this was a case which required one to be in
a passion one way or the other; so I feigned anger, and talked with
exceeding dignity about the predicament I had been placed in the day
before.

"Such must always be the case," said I, "when one is weak enough to form
an attachment to a lady who encourages so many others!"

"For your sake," said the tender dame, "for your sake, then, I will
discard them all!"

There was something grand in this it might have elicited a few strokes
of pathos, when--never was there anything so strangely provoking--the
Abbe Dubois himself was heard in my anteroom. I thought this chance,
but it was more; the good Abbe, I afterwards found, had traced cause for
suspicion, and had come to pay me a visit of amatory police. I opened
my dressing-room door, and thrust in the lady. "There," said I, "are the
back-stairs, and at the bottom of the back-stairs is a door."

Would not any one have thought this hint enough? By no means; this
very tall lady stooped to the littleness of listening, and, instead of
departing, stationed herself by the keyhole.

I never exactly learned whether Dubois suspected the visit his mistress
had paid me, or whether he merely surmised, from his spies or her
escritoire, that she harboured an inclination towards me; in either case
his policy was natural, and like himself. He sat himself down, talked of
the Regent, of pleasure, of women, and, at last, of this very tall lady
in question.

"_La pauvre diablesse_," said he, contemptuously, "I had once compassion
on her; I have repented it ever since. You have no idea what a terrible
creature she is; has such a wen in her neck, quite a _goitre_. _Mort
diable_!" (and the Abbe spat in his handkerchief), "I would sooner have
a _liaison_ with the witch of Endor!"

Not content with this, he went on in his usual gross and displeasing
manner to enumerate or to forge those various particulars of her
personal charms which he thought most likely to steel me against her
attractions. "Thank Heaven, at least," thought I, "that she has gone!"

Scarcely had this pious gratulation flowed from my heart, before the
door was burst open, and, pale, trembling, eyes on fire, hands clenched,
forth stalked the lady in question. A wonderful proof how much sooner a
woman would lose her character than allow it to be called not worth
the losing! She entered, and had all the