nd until we return, I will bid Maignan keep the door, and admit no
one."

The crowd of those who daily left the Arsenal at nightfall happened to
be augmented on this occasion by a troop of my clients from Mantes;
tenants on the lands of Rosny, who had lingered after the hour of
audience to see the courts and garden. By mingling with these we passed
out unobserved; nor, once in the streets, where a thaw had set in, that
filled the kennel with water, was La Font long in bringing me to the
house I sought. It stood on the outskirts of the St. Honore Faubourg, in
a quarter sufficiently respectable, and a street marked neither by
squalor nor ostentation--from one or other of which all desperate
enterprises take their rise. The house, which was high and narrow,
presented only two windows to the street, but the staircase was clean,
and it was impossible to cross the threshold without feeling a
prepossession in Felix's favour. Already I began to think that I had
come on a fool's errand.

"Which floor?" I asked La Font.

"The highest," he answered.

I went up softly and he followed me. Under the tiles I found a door, and
heard some one moving beyond it. Bidding La Font remain on guard, and
come to my aid only if I called him, I knocked boldly. A gentle voice
bade me enter, and I did so.

There was only one person in the room, a young woman with fair waving
hair, a pale freckled face, and blue eyes; who, seeing a cloaked
stranger instead of the neighbour she anticipated, stared at me in the
utmost wonder and in some alarm. The room, though poorly furnished, was
neat and clean; which, taken with the woman's complexion, left me in no
doubt as to her province. On the floor near the fire stood a cradle;
and in the window a cage with a singing bird completed the homely aspect
of this interior, which was such, indeed, as I would fain multiply by
thousands in every town of France.

A lamp, which the woman was in the act of lighting, enabled me to see
these details, and also discovered me to her. I asked politely if I
spoke to Madame Felix, the wife of M. Felix, of the Chamber of Accounts.

"I am Madame Felix," she answered, advancing slowly towards me. "My
husband is late. Do you come from him? It is not--bad news, Monsieur?"

The tone of anxiety in which she uttered the last question, and the
quickness with which she raised her lamp to scan my face, went to a
heart already softened by the sight of this young mother in her home.