lways painful to
have to proceed to such extremities. It is frequent, very--and
ninety-nine times in the hundred, we run up against the woman for whom a
great magistrate advised the search whenever a crime is perpetrated."

"It would appear that you expect to induce me to commit that crime!"
sneered the woman, pale but rebellious.

"We have no need to induce you, dear madame, for we can constrain you."

"Constrain me!" repeated the woman savagely and tossing her head with
pride. "If you really knew my nature, you would not say that. You might
tell me how?"

"Really know you? you shall judge for yourself. In your marriage
certificate, you are described as of the Vieradlers, but your eagle is
not the German one--it is the Polish. The women of your race are
distinguished for beauty, when young, and freedom in love at all times.
Your grandma has a volumnious chronicle of scandal all to herself, but
her glory is thrown into the shade by the peculiar celebrity enjoyed
rather briefly by her favorite daughter, La Belle Iza, that one of the
Sirens of Paris who has, under the present Empire, lured the most men to
wreck. This was your aunt. Her sister, your mother, quite as beautiful,
was rescued at an early hour from her mother's manoevres to 'place' her,
as she called it, and for this loss, the indignant old lady vowed a kind
of unnatural vengeance, to be visited on the child of her who had
offended her by remaining in the path of virtue. This child is the woman
before me. Oh, it is useless to look at me like that!" he grimly said,
with the perplexed air of a man with no ear for music who listens to a
music-box delighting others. "Pure wasted labor! The old lady, who had
fallen from her high estate where Iza had lifted her, and was ordered
out of the capital for extorting hush-money upon her daughter's stock of
love-letters, the old lady became a queen--a queen of the disreputable
classes. In Munich, sleepy old town where superstitions linger and the
women are as besotted with ignorance as the men with beer, she ruled the
beggars and vagabonds. It was there that fate led you and you fell under
her hand. She pretended to befriend you, for even so young, you promised
to have power by your charms, renewing those she had never forgotten in
her lost Iza. No one consulted the Almanack de Gotha when you were
launched on an admiring society as one of the Vieradlers. You soon won
a great reputation for freshness of wit and coquetry in