iled! The smile was so
vacuous that it misled the Baroness; she took it for an expression
of kindness.

"You see a woman, not indeed in despair, but with her honor at the
point of death, and prepared for everything, my dear friend, to hinder
a crime."

Fearing that Hortense might come in, she bolted the door; then with
equal impetuosity she fell at Crevel's feet, took his hand and kissed
it.

"Be my deliverer!" she cried.

She thought there was some generous fibre in this mercantile soul, and
full of sudden hope that she might get the two hundred thousand francs
without degrading herself:

"Buy a soul--you were once ready to buy virtue!" she went on, with a
frenzied gaze. "Trust to my honesty as a woman, to my honor, of which
you know the worth! Be my friend! Save a whole family from ruin,
shame, despair; keep it from falling into a bog where the quicksands
are mingled with blood! Oh! ask for no explanations," she exclaimed,
at a movement on Crevel's part, who was about to speak. "Above all, do
not say to me, 'I told you so!' like a friend who is glad at a
misfortune. Come now, yield to her whom you used to love, to the woman
whose humiliation at your feet is perhaps the crowning moment of her
glory; ask nothing of her, expect what you will from her gratitude!
--No, no. Give me nothing, but lend--lend to me whom you used to call
Adeline----"

At this point her tears flowed so fast, Adeline was sobbing so
passionately, that Crevel's gloves were wet. The words, "I need two
hundred thousand francs," were scarcely articulate in the torrent of
weeping, as stones, however large, are invisible in Alpine cataracts
swollen by the melting of the snows.

This is the inexperience of virtue. Vice asks for nothing, as we have
seen in Madame Marneffe; it gets everything offered to it. Women of
that stamp are never exacting till they have made themselves
indispensable, or when a man has to be worked as a quarry is worked
where the lime is rather scarce--going to ruin, as the quarry-men say.

On hearing these words, "Two hundred thousand francs," Crevel
understood all. He cheerfully raised the Baroness, saying insolently:

"Come, come, bear up, mother," which Adeline, in her distraction,
failed to hear. The scene was changing its character. Crevel was
becoming "master of the situation," to use his own words. The vastness
of the sum startled Crevel so greatly that his emotion at seeing this
handsome woman in tears at his fee