om him. "If you
have any more serious reasons to give me than these," he said quietly and
coldly, "let me hear them between this and post-time tomorrow. In the
meanwhile, I need not detain you any longer."

Madame Fontaine rose also--but she was not quite defeated yet.

"As things are, then," she resumed, "I am to understand, sir, that the
marriage is put off to the thirteenth of January next?"

"Yes, with your daughter's consent."

"Suppose my daughter changes her mind, in the interval?"

"Under your influence?"

"Mr. Keller! you insult me."

"I should insult your daughter, Madame Fontaine--after what she said in
this room before me and before other witnesses--if I supposed her to be
capable of changing her mind, except under your influence.

"Good evening, sir."

"Good evening, madam."

She went back to her room.

The vacant spaces on the walls were prettily filled up with prints and
water-color drawings. Among these last was a little portrait of Mr.
Keller, in a glazed frame. She approached it--looked at it--and, suddenly
tearing it from the wall, threw it on the floor. It happened to fall with
the glass uppermost. She stamped on it, in a perfect frenzy of rage; not
only crushing the glass, but even breaking the frame, and completely
destroying the portrait as a work of art. "There! that has done me good,"
she said to herself--and kicked the fragments into a corner of the room.

She was now able to take a chair at the fireside, and shape out for
herself the course which it was safest to follow.

Minna was first in her thoughts. She could bend the girl to her will, and
send her to Mr. Keller. But he would certainly ask, under what influence
she was acting, in terms which would place the alternative between a
downright falsehood, or a truthful answer. Minna was truth itself; in her
youngest days, she had been one of those rare children who never take
their easy refuge in a lie. What influence would be most likely to
persuade her to deceive Fritz's father? The widow gave up the idea, in
the moment when it occurred to her. Once again, "Jezebel's Daughter"
unconsciously touched Jezebel's heart with the light of her purity and
her goodness. The mother shrank from deliberately degrading the nature of
her own child.

The horrid question of the money followed. On the thirty-first of the
month, the promissory note would be presented for payment. Where was the
money to be found?

Some little time since, havin