ether their trembling
hands revealed through the scented gloves the depth of their love. From
that day they had both of them taken great delight on those trifles
which happy lovers never disdain. One day the young man led his only
confidant, with a mysterious air, into a chamber where he kept under
glass globes upon his table, with more care than he would have bestowed
upon the finest jewels in the world, the flowers that, in the excitement
of the dance, had fallen from the hair of his mistress, and the finery
which had been caught in the trees which she had brushed through in the
park. He also preserved there the narrow footprint left upon the clay
soil by the lady's step.

"I could hear," said this confidant to me afterwards, "the violent and
repressed palpitations of his heart sounding in the silence which we
preserved before the treasures of this museum of love. I raised my eyes
to the ceiling, as if to breathe to heaven the sentiment which I dared
not utter. 'Poor humanity!' I thought. 'Madame de ----- told me that one
evening at a ball you had been found nearly fainting in her card-room?'
I remarked to him.

"'I can well believe it,' said he casting down his flashing glance, 'I
had kissed her arm!--But,' he added as he pressed my hand and shot at me
a glance that pierced my heart, 'her husband at that time had the gout
which threatened to attack his stomach.'"

Some time afterwards, the old man recovered and seemed to take a new
lease of life; but in the midst of his convalescence he took to his
bed one morning and died suddenly. There were such evident symptoms of
poisoning in the condition of the dead man that the officers of justice
were appealed to, and the two lovers were arrested. Then was enacted at
the court of assizes the most heartrending scene that ever stirred the
emotions of the jury. At the preliminary examination, each of the two
lovers without hesitation confessed to the crime, and with one thought
each of them was solely bent on saving, the one her lover, the other his
mistress. There were two found guilty, where justice was looking for
but a single culprit. The trial was entirely taken up with the flat
contradictions which each of them, carried away by the fury of devoted
love, gave to the admissions of the other. There they were united for
the first time, but on the criminals' bench with a gendarme seated
between them. They were found guilty by the unanimous verdict of a
weeping jury. No one