f. But after storm comes
sunshine: and I am happily assured by her less despairing appearance,
and by the new mourning that I have been making for her, that even now,
from the bottomless depth of her affliction, she looks beyond the
storm."

"I well believe it!" snapped Madame Vic. "That the appearance of Madame
Jolicoeur at any time has been despairing is a matter that has
escaped my notice. As to the mourning that she now wears, it is a
defiance of all propriety. Why, with no more than that of colour in her
frock"--Madame Vic upheld her thumb and finger infinitesimally
separated--"and with a mere pin-point of a flower in her bonnet, she
would be fit for the opera!"

Madame Vic spoke with a caustic bitterness that had its roots. Her own
venture in second marriage had been catastrophic--so catastrophic that
her neglected bakery had gone very much to the bad. Still more closely
to the point, Madame Jolicoeur--incident to finding entomologic
specimens misplaced in her breakfast-rolls--had taken the leading part
in an interchange of incivilities with the bakery's proprietor, and had
withdrawn from it her custom.

"And even were her mournings not a flouting of her short year of
widowhood," continued Madame Vic, with an acrimony that abbreviated the
term of widowhood most unfairly--"the scores of eligible suitors who
openly come streaming to her door, and are welcomed there, are as
trumpets proclaiming her audacious intentions and her indecorous
desires. Even Monsieur Brisson is in that outrageous procession! Is it
not enough that she should entice a repulsively bald-headed notary and
an old rake of a major to make their brazen advances, without suffering
this anatomy of a pharmacien to come treading on their heels?--he with
his hands imbrued in the life-blood of the unhappy old woman whom his
mismade prescription sent in agony to the tomb! Pah! I have no patience
with her! She and her grief and her seclusion and her sympathetic cat,
indeed! It all is a tragedy of indiscretion--that shapes itself as a
revolting farce!"

It will be observed that Madame Vic, in framing her bill of particulars,
practically reduced her alleged scores of Madame Jolicoeur's suitors
to precisely two--since the bad third was handicapped so heavily by that
notorious matter of the mismade prescription as to be a negligible
quantity, quite out of the race. Indeed, it was only the preposterous
temerity of Monsieur Brisson--despairingly clutching at