y
which means she could ascertain whether she would be remembered
generously in the patient's will, she could continue her flight or
retrace her steps.

Under cover of Hedwig, she could learn, secretly if she preferred it,
all that occurred at Montmorency. She found her grand-uncle broken with
age and serious attack; he was delighted by her beauty and to hear that
she was so happy in her married life! Evidently he was rich, and she had
not acted foolishly in going to see him.

Madame Lesperon and her husband recalled her grandmother--whose death
she did not describe--and her aunt, over whose fate they politely
blurred the rather lurid tints. Madame Lesperon, as became a poetess,
saw the loveliness of Clemenceau's idea of separation in marrying his
cousin and expressed a wish to compliment him face-to-face. Cesarine was
not so sure that he would come to town to escort her home, he was so
engrossed in an important project.

She let three days pass without writing a line, alleging that she had
not the heart while her dear uncle was in danger and that her husband
knew, of course, where she was piously engaged.

The next morning, Madame Lesperon, a regular reader of the newspapers in
expectation of the announcement of her poems having at last been
commended by the Academie, came up to the sick-room with the _Debats_.

"Ah, sly puss," said she, with a smile, "let me congratulate you. One
can know now why you were so close about your husband's mysterious
project. Rejoice, dear, for all France rejoices with you."

Cesarine stared all her wonder. The newspapers trumpeting her husband's
name and not in the satirical tone in which the people hail a disaster
to a George Dandin.

"The privately appointed committee which has been for some weeks
thoroughly investigating the marvelous invention--a revolution in
truth--in gunnery, at the Villa Reine-Claude, Montmorency, have
deposited a preliminary report at the Ministry of War. We are not at
liberty to state more than the prodigious result. On a miniature scale,
but which could be enlarged from millimetres to miles without, we are
assured, affecting the demonstration, it has been proved that the new
gun will throw solid shot twelve miles and its special shell nearly
fifteen. The model target was a row of pegs representing piles strongly
driven into clay, a little apart, with the interstices filled with racks
of stones. Two of the new-shaped projectiles dropped on this mark, lef