e same day they both gave me their
dismissal in identical terms."

"Well?"

"This is how it was.... You know that women always have an array of pins
about them. I know hairpins, I doubt them, and look after them, but the
others are much more treacherous; those confounded little black-headed
pins which look all alike to us, great fools that we are, but which they
can distinguish, just as we can distinguish a horse from a dog.

"Well, it appears that one day my minister's little wife left one of
those tell-tale instruments pinned to the paper, close to my
looking-glass. My usual one had immediately seen this little black
speck, no bigger than a flea, and had taken it out without saying a
word, and then had left one of her pins, which was also black, but of a
different pattern, in the same place.

"The next day, the minister's wife wished to recover her property, and
immediately recognized the substitution. Then her suspicions were
aroused, and she put in two and crossed them, and my original one
replied to this telegraphic signal by three black pellets, one on the
top of the other, and as soon as this method had begun, they continued
to communicate with one another, without saying a word, only to spy on
each other. Then it appears that the regular one, being bolder, wrapped
a tiny piece of paper round the little wire point, and wrote upon it:
_C. D., Poste Restante, Boulevards, Malherbes_.

"Then they wrote to each other. You understand that was not everything
that passed between them. They set to work with precaution, with a
thousand stratagems, with all the prudence that is necessary in such
cases, but the regular one did a bold stroke, and made an appointment
with the other. I do not know what they said to each other; all that I
know is, that I had to pay the costs of their interview. There you have
it all!"

"Is that all?"

"Yes."

"And you do not see them any more?"

"I beg your pardon. I see them as friends, for we have not quarreled
altogether."

"And have they met again?"

"Yes, my dear fellow, they have become intimate friends."

"And has not that given you an idea?"

"No, what idea?"

"You great booby! The idea of making them put back the pins where they
found them."

UNDER THE YOKE

As he was a man of quiet and regular habits, and of a simple and
affectionate disposition, and had nothing to disturb the even tenor of
his life, Monsieur de Loubancourt suffered more than most men do