much!"

Georges said nothing, but he was all aflame. His fair hair was in
disorder; his blue eyes shone like tapers, so fiercely had the vice,
which for some days past had surrounded him, inflamed and stirred his
blood. At last he was going to plunge into all that he had dreamed of!

"I don't know the address," La Faloise resumed.

"She lives on a third floor in the Boulevard Haussmann, between the Rue
de l'Arcade and the Rue Pesquier," said Georges all in a breath.

And when the other looked at him in much astonishment, he added, turning
very red and fit to sink into the ground with embarrassment and conceit:

"I'm of the party. She invited me this morning."

But there was a great stir in the drawing room, and Vandeuvres and
Fauchery could not continue pressing the count. The Marquis de Chouard
had just come in, and everyone was anxious to greet him. He had moved
painfully forward, his legs failing under him, and he now stood in the
middle of the room with pallid face and eyes blinking, as though he had
just come out of some dark alley and were blinded by the brightness of
the lamps.

"I scarcely hoped to see you tonight, Father," said the countess. "I
should have been anxious till the morning."

He looked at her without answering, as a man might who fails to
understand. His nose, which loomed immense on his shorn face, looked
like a swollen pimple, while his lower lip hung down. Seeing him such a
wreck, Mme Hugon, full of kind compassion, said pitying things to him.

"You work too hard. You ought to rest yourself. At our age we ought to
leave work to the young people."

"Work! Ah yes, to be sure, work!" he stammered at last. "Always plenty
of work."

He began to pull himself together, straightening up his bent figure and
passing his hand, as was his wont, over his scant gray hair, of which a
few locks strayed behind his ears.

"At what are you working as late as this?" asked Mme du Joncquoy. "I
thought you were at the financial minister's reception?"

But the countess intervened with:

"My father had to study the question of a projected law."

"Yes, a projected law," he said; "exactly so, a projected law. I shut
myself up for that reason. It refers to work in factories, and I was
anxious for a proper observance of the Lord's day of rest. It is really
shameful that the government is unwilling to act with vigor in the
matter. Churches are growing empty; we are running headlong to ruin."

Vandeuvres ha