better; still better will
it be if I can find one. If you don't consent to do this, I will kill
myself.'

"This time the comtesse ordered her daughter to go to bed and never to
speak again in this manner, so unbecoming in the mouth of a child toward
her mother.

"Yvette's answer to this was: 'I give you a month to reflect. If, at the
end of that month, we have not changed our way of living, I will kill
myself, since there is no other honorable issue left to my life.'

"And she left the room.

"At the end of a month the Comtesse Samoris had resumed her usual
entertainments, as though nothing had occurred. One day, under the
pretext that she had a bad toothache, Yvette purchased a few drops of
chloroform from a neighboring chemist. The next day she purchased more,
and every time she went out she managed to procure small doses of the
narcotic. She filled a bottle with it.

"One morning she was found in bed, lifeless and already quite cold, with
a cotton mask soaked in chloroform over her face.

"Her coffin was covered with flowers, the church was hung in white.
There was a large crowd at the funeral ceremony.

"Ah! well, if I had known--but you never can know--I would have married
that girl, for she was infernally pretty."

"And what became of the mother?"

"Oh! she shed a lot of tears over it. She has only begun to receive
visits again for the past week."

"And what explanation is given of the girl's death?"

"Oh! they pretended that it was an accident caused by a new stove, the
mechanism of which got out of order. As a good many such accidents have
occurred, the thing seemed probable enough."

A VENDETTA

The widow of Paolo Saverini lived alone with her son in a poor little
house on the outskirts of Bonifacio. The town, built on an outjutting
part of the mountain, in places even overhanging the sea, looks across
the straits, full of sandbanks, towards the southernmost coast of
Sardinia. Beneath it, on the other side and almost surrounding it, is
a cleft in the cliff like an immense corridor which serves as a harbor,
and along it the little Italian and Sardinian fishing boats come by a
circuitous route between precipitous cliffs as far as the first houses,
and every two weeks the old, wheezy steamer which makes the trip to
Ajaccio.

On the white mountain the houses, massed together, makes an even whiter
spot. They look like the nests of wild birds, clinging to this peak,
overlooking this terrible