which were included
in Valerie's bills, and paid for by the gentleman in possession. Thus
furbished up, and wearing the yellow cashmere shawl, Lisbeth would have
been unrecognizable by any one who had not seen her for three years.

This other diamond--a black diamond, the rarest of all--cut by a skilled
hand, and set as best became her, was appreciated at her full value by
certain ambitious clerks. Any one seeing her for the first time might
have shuddered involuntarily at the look of poetic wildness which the
clever Valerie had succeeded in bringing out by the arts of dress in
this Bleeding Nun, framing the ascetic olive face in thick bands of
hair as black as the fiery eyes, and making the most of the rigid, slim
figure. Lisbeth, like a Virgin by Cranach or Van Eyck, or a Byzantine
Madonna stepped out of its frame, had all the stiffness, the precision
of those mysterious figures, the more modern cousins of Isis and her
sister goddesses sheathed in marble folds by Egyptian sculptors. It was
granite, basalt, porphyry, with life and movement.

Saved from want for the rest of her life, Lisbeth was most amiable;
wherever she dined she brought merriment. And the Baron paid the rent
of her little apartment, furnished, as we know, with the leavings of her
friend Valerie's former boudoir and bedroom.

"I began," she would say, "as a hungry nanny goat, and I am ending as a
_lionne_."

She still worked for Monsieur Rivet at the more elaborate kinds of
gold-trimming, merely, as she said, not to lose her time. At the
same time, she was, as we shall see, very full of business; but it is
inherent in the nature of country-folks never to give up bread-winning;
in this they are like the Jews.

Every morning, very early, Cousin Betty went off to market with the
cook. It was part of Lisbeth's scheme that the house-book, which was
ruining Baron Hulot, was to enrich her dear Valerie--as it did indeed.

Is there a housewife who, since 1838, has not suffered from the evil
effects of Socialist doctrines diffused among the lower classes by
incendiary writers? In every household the plague of servants is
nowadays the worst of financial afflictions. With very few exceptions,
who ought to be rewarded with the Montyon prize, the cook, male or
female, is a domestic robber, a thief taking wages, and perfectly
barefaced, with the Government for a fence, developing the tendency to
dishonesty, which is almost authorized in the cook by the time-h