nd is kept in close confinement."

However well prepared Daniel was by Papa Ravinet's account, he could
never have hoped to manage the conversation as well as chance did. He
replied,--

"It cannot be for having robbed me. M. de Brevan must have been arrested
for having attempted to murder me."

The lioness who has just been robbed of her whelps does not rise with
greater fury in her eyes than Sarah did when she heard these words.

"What!" she cried aloud. "He has dared touch you!"

"Not personally; oh, no! But he hired for the base purpose a wretched
felon, who was caught, and has confessed everything. I see that the
order to apprehend my friend Maxime must have reached here before me,
although it left Saigon some time later than I did."

Might not M. de Brevan be as cowardly as Crochard when he saw that all
was lost? This idea, one would think, would have made Sarah tremble. But
it never occurred to her.

"Ah, the wretch!" she repeated. "The scoundrel, the rascal!"

And, sitting down by Daniel, she asked him to tell her all the details
of these attempted assassinations, from which he had escaped only by a
miracle.

The Countess Sarah, in fact, never doubted for a moment but that Daniel
was as madly in love with her as Planix, as Malgat, and Kergrist, and
all the others, had been, she had become so accustomed to find her
beauty irresistible and all powerful. How could it ever have occurred to
her, that this man, the very first whom she loved sincerely, should also
be the first and the only one to escape from her snares? She was taken
in, besides, by the double mirage of love and of absence.

During the last two years she had so often evoked the image of Daniel,
she had so constantly lived with him in her thoughts, that she mistook
the illusion of her desires for the reality, and was no longer able to
distinguish between the phantom of her dreams and the real person.

In the meantime he entertained her by describing to her his actual
position, lamenting over the treachery by which he had been ruined, and
adding how hard he would find it at thirty to begin the world anew.

And she, generally, so clearsighted, was not surprised to find that
this man, who had been disinterestedness itself, should all of a sudden
deplore his losses so bitterly, and value money so highly.

"Why do you not marry a rich woman?" she suddenly asked him.

He replied with a perfection of affected candor which he would not have
suspe