dly wounded in the side. For the second time in
ten days he was carried home in a fainting condition to his terrified
grandmother. This second accident gave him a feeling of distrust; he
thought, though vaguely, of Ferragus and Madame Jules. To throw light on
these suspicions he had the broken axle brought to his room and sent
for his carriage-maker. The man examined the axle and the fracture,
and proved two things: First, the axle was not made in his workshop; he
furnished none that did not bear the initials of his name on the iron.
But he could not explain by what means this axle had been substituted
for the other. Secondly, the breakage of the suspicious axle was caused
by a hollow space having been blown in it and a straw very cleverly
inserted.

"Eh! Monsieur le baron, whoever did that was malicious!" he said; "any
one would swear, to look at it, that the axle was sound."

Monsieur de Maulincour begged the carriage-maker to say nothing of the
affair; but he felt himself warned. These two attempts at murder were
planned with an ability which denoted the enmity of intelligent minds.

"It is war to the death," he said to himself, as he tossed in his
bed,--"a war of savages, skulking in ambush, of trickery and treachery,
declared in the name of Madame Jules. What sort of man is this to whom
she belongs? What species of power does this Ferragus wield?"

Monsieur de Maulincour, though a soldier and brave man, could not
repress a shudder. In the midst of many thoughts that now assailed him,
there was one against which he felt he had neither defence nor courage:
might not poison be employed ere long by his secret enemies? Under the
influence of fears, which his momentary weakness and fever and low diet
increased, he sent for an old woman long attached to the service of his
grandmother, whose affection for himself was one of those semi-maternal
sentiments which are the sublime of the commonplace. Without confiding
in her wholly, he charged her to buy secretly and daily, in different
localities, the food he needed; telling her to keep it under lock and
key and bring it to him herself, not allowing any one, no matter who, to
approach her while preparing it. He took the most minute precautions to
protect himself against that form of death. He was ill in his bed
and alone, and he had therefore the leisure to think of his own
security,--the one necessity clear-sighted enough to enable human
egotism to forget nothing!

But t