d have settled
the matter in a single phrase, "The girl is a little hussy." But for
a youth whose soul was noble and true, this attempt to put him, as it
were, upon his oath, this appeal to truth, had the power to awaken the
three judges hidden in the conscience of every man. Honor, Truth,
and Justice, getting on their feet, cried out in their several ways
energetically.

"Ah, my dear Ernest," said Truth, "you never would have read that lesson
to a rich heiress. No, my boy; you would have gone in hot haste to Havre
to find out if the girl were handsome, and you would have been very
unhappy indeed at her preference for genius; and if you could
have tripped up your friend and supplanted him in her affections,
Mademoiselle d'Este would have been a divinity."

"What?" cried Justice, "are you not always bemoaning yourselves, you
penniless men of wit and capacity, that rich girls marry beings whom you
wouldn't take as your servants? You rail against the materialism of the
century which hastens to join wealth to wealth, and never marries some
fine young man with brains and no money to a rich girl. What an outcry
you make about it; and yet here is a young woman who revolts against
that very spirit of the age, and behold! the poet replies with a blow at
her heart!"

"Rich or poor, young or old, ugly or handsome, the girl is right; she
has sense and judgment, she has tripped you over into the slough of
self-interest and lets you know it," cried Honor. "She deserves an
answer, a sincere and loyal and frank answer, and, above all, the honest
expression of your thought. Examine yourself! sound your heart and purge
it of its meannesses. What would Moliere's Alceste say?"

And La Briere, having started from the boulevard Poissoniere, walked so
slowly, absorbed in these reflections, that he was more than an hour in
reaching the boulevard des Capucines. Then he followed the quays, which
led him to the Cour des Comptes, situated in that time close to the
Saint-Chapelle. Instead of beginning on the accounts as he should have
done, he remained at the mercy of his perplexities.

"One thing is evident," he said to himself; "she hasn't six millions;
but that's not the point--"

Six days later, Modeste received the following letter:

Mademoiselle,--You are not a D'Este. The name is a feigned one to
conceal your own. Do I owe the revelations which you solicit to a
person who is untruthful about herself? Question for question: Are