ings
in such a flight without draggling her pinions in humiliation; rise
gracefully in revolt; scold without giving offence; and pardon without
compromising her personal dignity.

Julien went with the note. Julien, like his kind, was the victim of
love's marches and countermarches.

"What did M. de Montriveau reply?" she asked, as indifferently as she
could, when the man came back to report himself.

"M. le Marquis requested me to tell Mme la Duchesse that it was all
right."

Oh the dreadful reaction of the soul upon herself! To have her heart
stretched on the rack before curious witnesses; yet not to utter a
sound, to be forced to keep silence! One of the countless miseries of
the rich!

More than three weeks went by. Mme de Langeais wrote again and again,
and no answer came from Montriveau. At last she gave out that she was
ill, to gain a dispensation from attendance on the Princess and from
social duties. She was only at home to her father the Duc de Navarreins,
her aunt the Princesse de Blamont-Chauvry, the old Vidame de Pamiers
(her maternal great-uncle), and to her husband's uncle, the Duc de
Grandlieu. These persons found no difficulty in believing that the
Duchess was ill, seeing that she grew thinner and paler and more
dejected every day. The vague ardour of love, the smart of wounded
pride, the continual prick of the only scorn that could touch her,
the yearnings towards joys that she craved with a vain continual
longing--all these things told upon her, mind and body; all the forces
of her nature were stimulated to no purpose. She was paying the arrears
of her life of make-believe.

She went out at last to a review. M. de Montriveau was to be there. For
the Duchess, on the balcony of the Tuileries with the Royal Family,
it was one of those festival days that are long remembered. She looked
supremely beautiful in her languor; she was greeted with admiration in
all eyes. It was Montriveau's presence that made her so fair.

Once or twice they exchanged glances. The General came almost to her
feet in all the glory of that soldier's uniform, which produces an
effect upon the feminine imagination to which the most prudish will
confess. When a woman is very much in love, and has not seen her lover
for two months, such a swift moment must be something like the phase of
a dream when the eyes embrace a world that stretches away forever.
Only women or young men can imagine the dull, frenzied hunger in the
Duche