uld have been careful of her exquisite sensibility."

She insisted, nevertheless, upon taking her lesson as usual, and
recovered enough presence of mind to extract from the Signor Gismondo
everything that his much-regretted pupil had confided to him.

That was not much. He knew that his pupil had gone, like anyone
else, to Rue de Cherche Midi; that he had signed an engagement;
and had been ordered to join a regiment in process of formation
near Tours. And, as he went out,

"That is nothing," said the kind maestro to Mme. Favoral. "The
signora has quite recovered, and is as gay as a lark."

The signora, shut up in her room, was shedding bitter tears. She
tried to reason with herself, and could not succeed. Never had
the strangeness of her situation so clearly appeared to her. She
repeated to herself that she must be mad to have thus become
attached to a stranger. She wondered how she could have allowed
that love, which was now her very life, to take possession of her
soul. But to what end? It no longer rested with her to undo what
had been done.

When she thought that Marius de Tregars was about to leave Paris
to become a soldier, to fight, to die perhaps, she felt her head
whirl; she saw nothing around her but despair and chaos.

And, the more she thought, the more certain she felt that Marius
could not have trusted solely to the chance gossip of the Signor
Pulei to communicate to her his determination.

"It is perfectly inadmissible," she thought. "It is impossible that
he will not make an effort to see me before going."

Thoroughly imbued with the idea, she wiped her eyes, took a seat
by an open window; and, whilst apparently busy with her work, she
concentrated her whole attention upon the street.

There were more people out than usual. The recent events had
stirred Paris to its lowest depths, and, as from the crater of a
volcano in labor, all the social scoriae rose to the surface. Men
of sinister appearance left their haunts, and wandered through the
city. The workshops were all deserted; and people strolled at
random, stupor or terror painted on their countenance. But in vain
did Mlle. Gilberte seek in all this crowd the one she hoped to see.
The hours went by, and she was getting discouraged, when suddenly,
towards dusk, at the corner of the Rue Turenne,

"'Tis he," cried a voice within her.

It was, in fact, M. de Tregars. He was walking towards the
Boulevard, slowly, and his eyes ra