magnanimous?" said he. By this time the
baroness had got her rejected admirer as far as the door.--"For a
libertine!" said he, with a lofty grimace of virtue and superior wealth.

"If you are right, my constancy has some merit, monsieur. That is all."

After bowing to the officer as a woman bows to dismiss an importune
visitor, she turned away too quickly to see him once more fold his arms.
She unlocked the doors she had closed, and did not see the threatening
gesture which was Crevel's parting greeting. She walked with a proud,
defiant step, like a martyr to the Coliseum, but her strength was
exhausted; she sank on the sofa in her blue room, as if she were
ready to faint, and sat there with her eyes fixed on the tumble-down
summer-house, where her daughter was gossiping with Cousin Betty.

From the first days of her married life to the present time the Baroness
had loved her husband, as Josephine in the end had loved Napoleon, with
an admiring, maternal, and cowardly devotion. Though ignorant of the
details given her by Crevel, she knew that for twenty years past Baron
Hulot been anything rather than a faithful husband; but she had sealed
her eyes with lead, she had wept in silence, and no word of reproach had
ever escaped her. In return for this angelic sweetness, she had won her
husband's veneration and something approaching to worship from all who
were about her.

A wife's affection for her husband and the respect she pays him are
infectious in a family. Hortense believed her father to be a perfect
model of conjugal affection; as to their son, brought up to admire the
Baron, whom everybody regarded as one of the giants who so effectually
backed Napoleon, he knew that he owed his advancement to his father's
name, position, and credit; and besides, the impressions of childhood
exert an enduring influence. He still was afraid of his father; and if
he had suspected the misdeeds revealed by Crevel, as he was too much
overawed by him to find fault, he would have found excuses in the view
every man takes of such matters.

It now will be necessary to give the reasons for the extraordinary
self-devotion of a good and beautiful woman; and this, in a few words,
is her past history.

Three brothers, simple laboring men, named Fischer, and living in a
village situated on the furthest frontier of Lorraine, were compelled
by the Republican conscription to set out with the so-called army of the
Rhine.

In 1799 the s