th, flung it in the fire, and cried aloud, "Ah! base
that he is! I was his, and he had ceased to love me!"

She sank half dead upon the couch.

M. de Nueil went out as soon as he had written his letter. When he came
back, Jacques met him on the threshold with a note. "Madame la Marquise
has left the chateau," said the man.

M. de Nueil, in amazement, broke the seal and read:--

"MADAME,--If I could cease to love you, to take the chances of
becoming an ordinary man which you hold out to me, you must admit
that I should thoroughly deserve my fate. No, I shall not do as
you bid me; the oath of fidelity which I swear to you shall only
be absolved by death. Ah! take my life, unless indeed you do not
fear to carry a remorse all through your own..."

It was his own letter, written to the Marquise as she set out for Geneva
nine years before. At the foot of it Claire de Bourgogne had written,
"Monsieur, you are free."

M. de Nueil went to his mother at Manerville. In less than three weeks
he married Mlle. Stephanie de la Rodiere.

If this commonplace story of real life ended here, it would be to some
extent a sort of mystification. The first man you meet can tell you a
better. But the widespread fame of the catastrophe (for, unhappily, this
is a true tale), and all the memories which it may arouse in those who
have known the divine delights of infinite passion, and lost them
by their own deed, or through the cruelty of fate,--these things may
perhaps shelter the story from criticism.

Mme. la Marquise de Beauseant never left Valleroy after her parting from
M. de Nueil. After his marriage she still continued to live there, for
some inscrutable woman's reason; any woman is at liberty to assign
the one which most appeals to her. Claire de Bourgogne lived in such
complete retirement that none of the servants, save Jacques and her own
woman, ever saw their mistress. She required absolute silence all about
her, and only left her room to go to the chapel on the Valleroy estate,
whither a neighboring priest came to say mass every morning.

The Comte de Nueil sank a few days after his marriage into something
like conjugal apathy, which might be interpreted to mean happiness or
unhappiness equally easily.

"My son is perfectly happy," his mother said everywhere.

Mme. Gaston de Nueil, like a great many young women, was a rather
colorless character, sweet and passive. A month after her marriage she
had expe