ike."

"I have chosen," Madame Mildau replied calmly.

"What, already!" her husband cried. "You sly creature. You have been
keeping this up your sleeve. What is it?"

"A diamond tiara," was the cool reply. "The one you said you could not
afford last Christmas."

"Mon Dieu!" her husband gasped. "I shall be ruined."

"You will be ruined if you do not give it to me," Madame Mildau replied,
"for in that case I should leave you. I couldn't live with a liar."

Her husband wrung his hands. He implored her to choose something else,
but it was of no avail, and within two hours Madame Mildau had visited
the jeweller and the tiara was hers.

The eventful day came at last, and Madame Mildau, escorted by her
husband, attended one of the most popular balls of the season. She did
not wear her tiara. There had been several highway jewellery robberies
in the neighbourhood of late, and she pleased her husband immensely by
leaving her diamonds carefully locked up at home.

"You are prudence itself," he said, gazing at her in admiration. "And as
a reward you shall dance all the evening whilst I look on and admire
you."

But soon Madame Mildau could dance no longer. She had a very bad
headache, and begged her husband to take her home. M. Mildau was very
sympathetic. He was very sorry for his wife, and suggested that she
should take some brandy. She readily agreed that a little brandy might
do her good, and they took some together in their bedroom, after which
madame's husband remembered little more. He had a vague notion that his
wife was rolling his neck-handkerchief round his forehead in the form of
a Turkish turban, and patting him on the cheeks and smilingly wishing
him a thousand pleasant dreams, and then--all was a blank. He might as
well have been dead. With madame it was otherwise. The headache was, of
course, a ruse. The brandy she had given her husband had been well
drugged, and no sooner had she made sure it had taken effect than she
snapped her daintily manicured finger-tips in the air, and retiring to
her dressing-room, changed the dress she was wearing for one ten times
more costly and beautiful--a dress of rose-coloured gauze, upon which a
drapery of lace was suspended by agraffes of diamonds. A wreath of pale
roses, that seemed to have been bathed in the dew of the morning, the
better to harmonize with the delicate complexion of her lovely face,
nestled in her hair, and above it, more magnificent than anything yet