quivering, full of dread and horror; and when at last he turned his steps
homeward it was with a heavy heart indeed.

The weeks went by, the winter ran its course, and March had come round,
when the memory of all that the young fellow had heard and seen that
day--things which he had vainly striven to forget--was revived in the
most startling fashion. One morning at eight o'clock Morange abruptly
called at the little pavilion in the Rue de la Federation, accompanied by
his daughter Reine. The cashier was livid, haggard, distracted, and as
soon as Reine had joined Mathieu's children, and could not hear what he
said, he implored the young man to come with him. In a gasp he told the
dreadful truth--Valerie was dying. Her daughter believed her to be in the
country, but that was a mere fib devised to quiet the girl. Valerie was
elsewhere, in Paris, and he, Morange, had a cab waiting below, but lacked
the strength to go back to her alone, so poignant was his grief, so great
his dread.

Mathieu was expecting a happy event that very day, and he at first told
the cashier that he could not possibly go with him; but when he had
informed Marianne that he believed that something dreadful had happened
to the Moranges, she bravely bade him render all assistance. And then the
two men drove, as Mathieu had anticipated, to the Rue du Rocher, and
there found the hapless Valerie, not dying, but dead, and white, and icy
cold. Ah! the desperate, tearless grief of the husband, who fell upon his
knees at the bedside, benumbed, annihilated, as if he also felt death's
heavy hand upon him.

For a moment, indeed, the young man anticipated exposure and scandal. But
when he hinted this to La Rouche she faintly smiled. She had friends on
many sides, it seemed. She had already reported Valerie's death at the