he is an impostor, dear monsieur," she said languidly: "do pray
exert yourself, and prove him one. What is your evidence?"

She leaned back in the very chair where she had sat looking at Valmond a
few weeks before, her fingers idly smoothing out the folds of her dress.

"Oh, the thing is impossible," he answered, blowing the smoke of a
cigarette; "we've had no real proof of his birth, and life--and so on."

"But there are relics--and so on!" she said suggestively, and she picked
up the miniature of the Emperor.

"Owning a skeleton doesn't make it your ancestor," he replied.

He laughed, for he was pleased at his own cleverness, and he also wished
to remain good-tempered.

"I am so glad to see you at last take the true attitude towards
this," she responded brightly. "If it's a comedy, enjoy it. If it's
a tragedy"--she drew herself up with a little shudder, for she was
thinking of that figure dropping from Elise's window--"you cannot stop
it. Tragedy is inevitable; but comedy is within the gift and governance
of mortals."

For a moment again she was lost in the thought of Elise, of Valmond's
vulgarity and commonness; and he had dared to speak words of love almost
to her! She flushed to the hair, as she had done fifty times since she
had seen him that moonlit night. Ah, she had thought him the dreamer,
the enthusiast--maybe, in kind, credulous moments, the great man he
claimed to be; and he had only been the sensualist after all! That he
did not love Elise, she knew well enough: he had been coldblooded; in
this, at least, he was Napoleonic.

She had not spoken with him since that night; but she had had two long
letters superscribed: "In Camp, Headquarters, Dalgrothe Mountain," and
these had breathed only patriotism, the love of a cause, the warmth of
a strong, virile temperament, almost a poetical abandon of unnamed
ambitions and achievements. She had read the letters again and again,
for she had found it hard to reconcile them with her later knowledge of
this man. He wrote to her as to an ally, frankly, warmly. She felt the
genuine thing in him somewhere; and, in spite of all, she felt a sort
of kinship for him. Yet that scene--that scene! She flushed with anger
again, and, in spite of her smiling lips, the young Seigneur saw the
flush, and wondered.

"The thing must end soon," he said, as he rose to go, for a messenger
had come for him. "He is injuring the peace, the trade, and the life
of the parishes; he is