tful virtues--patient application, conscientious technicality,
absorption in work. When he seated himself at his table Dorsenne was
heart and soul in his business. He closed his door, he opened no letters
nor telegrams, and he spent ten hours without taking anything but two
eggs and some black coffee, as he did on this particular day, when
looking over the essays of his twenty-fifth year with the talent of
his thirty-fifth, retouching here a word, rewriting an entire page,
dissatisfied here, smiling there at his thought. The pen flew, carrying
with it all the sensibility of the intellectual man who had completely
forgotten Madame Steno, Gorka, Maitland, and the calumniated Contessina,
until he should awake from his lucid intoxication at nightfall. As he
counted, in arranging the slips, the number of articles prepared, he
found there were twelve.

"Like Gorka's letters," said he aloud, with a laugh. He now felt
coursing through his veins the lightness which all writers of his kind
feel when they have labored on a work they believe good. "I have earned
my evening," he added, still in a loud voice. "I must now dress and go
to Madame Steno's. A good dinner at the doctor's. A half-hour's walk.
The night promises to be divine. I shall find out if they have news
of the Palatine,"--the name he gave Gorka in his moments of gayety. "I
shall talk in a loud voice of anonymous letters. If the author of
those received by Boleslas is there, I shall be in the best position to
discover him; provided that it is not Alba.... Decidedly--that would be
sad!"

It was ten o'clock in the evening, when the young man, faithful to his
programme, arrived at the door of the large house on the Rue du Vingt
Septembre occupied by Madame Steno. It was an immense modern structure,
divided into two distinct parts; to the left a revenue building and
to the right a house on the order of those which are to be seen on the
borders of Park Monceau. The Villa Steno, as the inscription in gold
upon the black marble door indicated, told the entire story of the
Countess's fortune--that fortune appraised by rumor, with its habitual
exaggeration, now at twenty, now at thirty, millions. She had in reality
two hundred and fifty thousand francs' income. But as, in 1873, Count
Michel Steno, her husband, died, leaving only debts, a partly ruined
palace at Venice and much property heavily mortgaged, the amount of that
income proved the truth of the title, "superior woman,