he has not answered it. And your
maid is not here either. Ring for her. I should like another blanket on
my bed to-night."

"Pauline is out," the Marquise said drily.

"What, at midnight!" exclaimed the General.

"I gave her leave to go to the Opera."

"That is funny!" returned her husband, continuing to undress. "I thought
I saw her coming upstairs."

"She has come in then, of course," said Julie, with assumed impatience,
and to allay any possible suspicion on her husband's part she pretended
to ring the bell.

The whole history of that night has never been known, but no doubt it
was as simple and as tragically commonplace as the domestic incidents
that preceded it.

Next day the Marquise d'Aiglemont took to her bed, nor did she leave it
for some days.

"What can have happened in your family so extraordinary that every one
is talking about your wife?" asked M. de Ronquerolles of M. d'Aiglemont
a short time after that night of catastrophes.

"Take my advice and remain a bachelor," said d'Aiglemont. "The curtains
of Helene's cot caught fire, and gave my wife such a shock that it will
be a twelvemonth before she gets over it; so the doctor says. You marry
a pretty wife, and her looks fall off; you marry a girl in blooming
health, and she turns into an invalid. You think she has a passionate
temperament, and find her cold, or else under her apparent coldness
there lurks a nature so passionate that she is the death of you, or
she dishonors your name. Sometimes the meekest of them will turn out
crotchety, though the crotchety ones never grow any sweeter. Sometimes
the mere child, so simple and silly at first, will develop an iron will
to thwart you and the ingenuity of a fiend. I am tired of marriage."

"Or of your wife?"

"That would be difficult. By-the-by, do you feel inclined to go to
Saint-Thomas d'Aquin with me to attend Lord Grenville's funeral?"

"A singular way of spending time.--Is it really known how he came by his
death?" added Ronquerolles.

"His man says that he spent a whole night sitting on somebody's window
sill to save some woman's character, and it has been infernally cold
lately."

"Such devotion would be highly creditable to one of us old stagers; but
Lord Grenville was a youngster and--an Englishman. Englishmen never can
do anything like anybody else."

"Pooh!" returned d'Aiglemont, "these heroic exploits all depend upon the
woman in the case, and it certainly was not for one tha