y forth.

"Already?" exclaimed the unhappy husband; "how punctual she is! She
fears to keep him waiting," cried the marquis, with a mixture of irony
and savage rage.

The cold was excessive; the pavement hard and dry. Clemence was dressed
in a black velvet bonnet, covered with a veil of the same colour, and a
thickly wadded pelisse of dark ruby satin, a large shawl of dark blue
cashmere fell to the very hem of her pelisse, which she lightly and
gracefully held up while crossing the street. Thanks to this movement,
the taper foot and graceful ankle of Madame d'Harville, cased in an
exquisitely fitting boot of black satin, were exposed to view.

It was strange, that amid the painful and bewildering ideas that crowded
the brain of D'Harville, he should have found one thought to waste upon
the beauty of his wife's foot; but so it was; and at the moment that was
about to separate them for ever, to his eager gaze that fairy foot and
well-turned ankle had never looked so charming; and then, as by a rapid
train of thought he recalled the matchless loveliness of his wife, and,
as he had ever believed till now, her purity, her mental graces, he
groaned aloud as he remembered that another was preferred to him, and
that the light figure that glided on before his fixed gaze, was but the
hollow spectre of fallen goodness, a lost, degraded creature, hastening
to steep her husband and infant in irremediable disgrace, for the
indulging of a base and guilty passion. Even in that wretched moment he
felt how dearly, how exclusively he had loved her; and for the first
time during the blow which had fallen on him, he knew that he mourned
the lovely woman almost equally with the virtuous mother and chaste
wife. A cry of rage and mingled fury escaped him, as he pictured the
rapture of her meeting with the lover of her choice; and a sharp,
darting pain quivered through his heart as he remembered that Clemence,
with all her youth and beauty, her countless charms, both of body and
mind, was lost to him for ever.

Hitherto his passionate grief had been unmixed by any alloy of self. He
had bewailed the sanctity of the marriage-vow trampled under foot, the
abandonment of all sworn and sacred duties; but his sufferings of rage,
jealousy, and regret almost overpowered him, and with much difficulty
was he able to command his voice sufficiently to say to the coachman,
while partially drawing up the blind:

"Do you see that lady in the blue shawl an