lant sacrifice was well
bestowed.

The ardor of Jaune's passion was increased--as has been common in love
matters ever since the world began--by the knowledge that he had a
rival; and this rival was a most dangerous rival, being none other than
Madame Carthame's second-story-front lodger, the Count Siccatif de
Courtray. Simply to be the second-story-front lodger carries with it a
most notable distinction in a lodging-house; but to be that and a count
too was a combination of splendors that placed Jaune's rival on a
social pinnacle and kept him there. Not that counts are rare in the
region between west and south of Washington Square; on the contrary,
they are rather astonishingly plentiful. But the sort of count who is
very rare indeed there is the count who pays his way as he goes along.
Now, in the matter of payments, at least so far as Madame Carthame was
concerned, the Count Siccatif de Courtray was exemplary.

That there was something of a mystery about this nobleman was
undeniable. Among other things, he had stated that he was a relative of
the Siccatifs of Harlem--the old family established here in New
Amsterdam in the early days of the Dutch Colony. Persons disposed to
comment invidiously upon this asserted relationship, and such there
were, did not fail to draw attention to the fact that the Harlem
Siccatifs, without exception, were fair, while the Count Siccatif de
Courtray was strikingly dark; and to the further fact that, if the
distinguished American family really was akin to the Count, its several
members were most harmoniously agreed to give him the cold shoulder.
With these malicious whisperings, however, Madame Carthame did not
concern herself. She was content, more than content, to take the Count
as he was, and at his own valuation. That he was a proscribed
Bonapartist, as he declared himself to be, seemed to her a reasonable
and entirely credible statement; and it certainly had the effect of
creating about him a halo of romance. Though not proscribed, Madame
Carthame herself was a Bonapartist, and a most ardent one; a fact, it
may be observed, concerning which the Count assured himself prior to
the avowal of his own political convictions. When, on the 2Oth of
April, he came home wearing a cluster of violets in his buttonhole, and
bearing also a bunch of these imperial flowers for Madame Carthame, and
with the presentation confessed his own imperialistic faith and touched
gloomily upon the sorry rewar