nowledge of the real
cause of Madeleine's misfortune,--the jealous grisette whom she had
set on to worse than murder.

But she was thinking only of Jean Marot now. Love had awakened her
soul to the enormity of her offence. It also caused her to suffer
remorse for her general conduct. Before she loved she never cared; she
had never suffered mentally. Now she was on the rack. She was being
punished.

Love had furrowed the virgin ground of her heart and turned up
self-consciousness and conscience, and sowed womanly sweetness, and
tenderness, and pity, and humility, and the sensitiveness to pain.

Mlle. Fouchette, living in the shadow of the world's greatest
educational institutions, was, perhaps naturally, a heathen. She
feared neither God nor devil.

Jean Marot was her only tangible idea of God. His contempt would be
her punishment. To live where he was not would be Hell.

To secure herself against this damnation she was ready to sacrifice
anything,--everything! She would have willingly offered herself to be
cuffed and beaten every day of her life by him, and would have
worshipped him and kissed the hand that struck her.

Perhaps, after all, the purest and holiest love is that which stands
ready to sacrifice everything to render its object happy; that,
blotting out self and trampling natural desire underfoot, thinks only
of the one great aim and end, the happiness of the beloved.

This was the instinct now of the girl who struggled with her emotions,
who sought a way out that would accomplish that end very much desired
by her as well as Jean. There was at the same time a faint idea that
her own material happiness lay in the same direction.

"Monsieur Jean!"

"Well?"

"You must make friends with Lerouge."

"But, mon enfant, if----"

"There are no 'buts' and 'ifs.' You must make friends with the brother
or you can never hope to win his sister. That is clear. Write to
him,--apologize to him,--anything----"

"I don't just see my way open," he began. "You can't apologize to a
man who tries to assassinate you on sight."

"You were friends before that day in the Place de la Concorde?"

"We had not come to blows."

"Politics,--is that all?"

"That is all that divides us, and, parbleu! it divides a good many in
France just now."

"Yes. Monsieur Jean, you must change your politics," she promptly
responded.

"Wha-at? Never! Why----"

"Not for the woman you love?"

"But, Fouchette, you don't understand,