The Project Gutenberg EBook of Led Astray and The Sphinx, by Octave Feuillet

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Title: Led Astray and The Sphinx
Two Novellas In One Volume

Author: Octave Feuillet

Release Date: July 31, 2005 [EBook #16403]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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LED ASTRAY

_By_ OCTAVE FEUILLET, _author of "Romance of a
Poor Young Man," etc._

[Illustration]

NEW YORK AND LONDON

STREET & SMITH, PUBLISHERS

Copyright, 1891

By STREET & SMITH

LED ASTRAY.

CHAPTER I.

A GRAPHIC DESCRIPTION.

GEORGE L---- to PAUL B., PARIS.

ROZEL, _15th September_.

It's nine o'clock in the evening, my dear friend, and you have just
arrived from Germany. They hand you my letter, the post-mark of which
informs you at once that I am absent from Paris. You indulge in a gesture
of annoyance, and call me a vagabond. Nevertheless, you settle down in
your best arm-chair, you open my letter, and you hear that I have been for
the past five days domesticated in a flour-mill in Lower Normandy. In a
flour-mill! What the duse can he be doing in a mill? A wrinkle appears on
your forehead, your eyebrows are drawn together; you lay down my letter
for a moment; you attempt to penetrate this mystery by the unaided power
of your imagination. Suddenly a playful expression beams upon your
countenance; your mouth expresses the irony of a wise man tempered by the
indulgence of a friend; you have caught a glimpse, through an
opera-comique cloud, of a miller's pretty wife with powdered hair, a waist
all trimmed with gay ribbons, a light and short skirt, and stockings with
gilded clocks; in short, one of those fair young millers' wives whose
heart goes pit-a-pat with hautboy accompaniment. But the graces who are
ever sporting in your mind sometimes lead it astray; my fair miller is as
much like the creature of your imagination as I am like a youthful Colin;
her head is adorned with a towering cotton night-cap to which the thickest
possible coating of flour fails to rest