she said to Calyste; "you have
betrayed her for Madame de Rochefide."

Calyste blushed, like a girl still respectable, detected in a fault.

"And," continued the duchess, "as you do not know how to deceive, you
have behaved in such a clumsy manner that Sabine has guessed the truth.
But I have for the present repaired your blunder. You do not wish the
death of my daughter, I am sure--All this, Monsieur Dommanget, will put
you on the track of her real illness and its cause. As for you, Calyste,
an old woman like me understands your error, though she does not pardon
it. Such pardons can only be brought by a lifetime of after happiness.
If you wish me to esteem you, you must, in the first place, save my
daughter; next, you must forget Madame de Rochefide; she is only worth
having once. Learn to lie; have the courage of a criminal, and his
impudence. I have just told a lie myself, and I shall have to do hard
penance for that mortal sin."

She then told the two men the lies she had invented. The clever
physician sitting at the bedside of his patient studied in her symptoms
the means of repairing the ill, while he ordered measures the success
of which depended on great rapidity of execution. Calyste sitting at
the foot of the bed strove to put into his glance an expression of
tenderness.

"So it was play which put those black circles round your eyes?" Sabine
said to him in a feeble voice.

The words made the doctor, the mother, and the viscountess tremble, and
they all three looked at one another covertly. Calyste turned as red as
a cherry.

"That's what comes of nursing a child," said Dommanget brutally, but
cleverly. "Husbands are lonely when separated from their wives, and they
go to the club and play. But you needn't worry over the thirty thousand
francs which Monsieur le baron lost last night--"

"Thirty thousand francs!" cried Ursula, in a silly tone.

"Yes, I know it," replied Dommanget. "They told me this morning at the
house of the young Duchesse Berthe de Maufrigneuse that it was Monsieur
de Trailles who won that money from you," he added, turning to Calyste.
"Why do you play with such men? Frankly, monsieur le baron, I can well
believe you are ashamed of it."

Seeing his mother-in-law, a pious duchess, the young viscountess, a
happy woman, and the old _accoucheur_, a confirmed egotist, all three
lying like a dealer in bric-a-brac, the kind and feeling Calyste
understood the greatness of the danger, and tw