esource with the Marquise de Rochefide," remarked
Clotilde, smiling, to her sister; "she never keeps her adorers long."

"D'Ajuda, my darling," continued the duchess, "was Monsieur de
Rochefide's brother-in-law. If our dear confessor approves of certain
little manoeuvres to which we must have recourse to carry out a plan
which I have proposed to your father, I can guarantee to you the
recovery of Calyste. My conscience is repugnant to the use of such
means, and I must first submit them to the judgment of the Abbe
Brossette. We shall not wait, my child, till you are _in extremis_
before coming to your relief. Keep a good heart! Your grief to-night is
so bitter that my secret escapes me; but it is impossible for me not to
give you a little hope."

"Will it make Calyste unhappy?" asked Sabine, looking anxiously at the
duchess.

"Oh, heavens! shall I ever be as silly as that!" cried Athenais,
naively.

"Ah, little girl, you know nothing of the precipices down which our
virtue flings us when led by love," replied Sabine, making a sort of
moral revelation, so distraught was she by her woe.

The speech was uttered with such incisive bitterness that the duchess,
enlightened by the tone and accent and look of her daughter, felt
certain there was some hidden trouble.

"My dears, it is midnight; come, go to bed," she said to Clotilde and
Athenais, whose eyes were shining.

"In spite of my thirty-five years I appear to be _de trop_," said
Clotilde, laughing. While Athenais kissed her mother, Clotilde leaned
over Sabine and said in her ear: "You will tell what it is? I'll dine
with you to-morrow. If my mother's conscience won't let her act, I--I
myself will get Calyste out of the hands of the infidels."

"Well, Sabine," said the duchess, taking her daughter into her bedroom,
"tell me, what new trouble is there, my child?"

"Mamma, I am lost!"

"But how?"

"I wanted to get the better of that horrible woman--I conquered for a
time--I am pregnant again--and Calyste loves her so that I foresee
a total abandonment. When she hears of it she will be furious. Ah! I
suffer such tortures that I cannot endure them long. I know when he
is going to her, I know it by his joy; and his peevishness tells me as
plainly when he leaves her. He no longer troubles himself to conceal his
feelings; I have become intolerable to him. She has an influence over
him as unhealthy as she is herself in soul and body. You'll see! she
will exact from