s a traitor in an anonymous letter to the fretting
husband, then in Rome. Her daughter agreed to make good the assertion
that the friend had failed monstrously in his trust.

Like Othello, Clemenceau swore that this demon of lasciviousness should
betray no more men. The force of depravity should no farther flow to
corrupt the finest and best. He entered the boudoir of the royal
favorite and stabbed her to the heart. In the morning, he gave himself
up to the police.

The victim was so notorious that the Clemenceau trial was a nine days'
wonder. His advocate was eloquent to a fault, but that inexplicable
thing, the jury, found no extenuating circumstances in the act and
brought in the verdict of murder. The good men were incapable of
appreciating the right he claimed to stop the blighting career of
Messalina--to divorce with steel where the state of the law, then meekly
following the ecclesiastical ruling, forbade any sundering of the
connubial tie except by death.

He met his doom calmly and laid his head beneath the axe with a martyr's
brow. Kaiserina acknowledged this.

Felix Clemenceau understood everything now. The trustees to whom he owed
his subsistence-money, M. Rollinet the imperial counsel, and M.
Constantin Ritz, a famous sculptor's son, and the life-companion of
Clemenceau, were characters in the momentous drama which Kaiserina
recited, whom he knew by correspondence.

The finger of fate, which had urged the artist to commit a homicide for
morality's sake, had pointed out to his son the way which had to be
followed over corpses of the young student's slaying.

Brooding over the alteration in his future, he exchanged hardly a word
with his cousin, during the prolonged journey, which they continued
together, as though mutual reluctance to part bound them indissolubly.
Logic said there should be a powerful repugnance between those whom the
shadow of the guillotine's red arm clouded. But, spite of all, Felix
felt that Kaiserina was, like himself, well within the circle of infamy.
Her mother was the sister of the shameful Iza, and her husband's careful
guard of her proved that he doubted her walking virtuously if her
unscrupulous mother stood by her side. This old Megara--who sold her
offspring to worse than death--was living--seemed eternal as evil
itself. It were a pious act to save Kaiserina from her as his father had
tried to do with Iza. He was pleased that she seemed inclined to cling
to him as though