deceive him; for he was an old man, and had about run the gamut of
human disappointments--a gamut that had begun with a C major of trust,
hope, happiness, and money.

His political party had thrown him aside. Neither for ambassador,
plenipotentiary, senator, congressman, not even for a clerkship, could
he be nominated by it. Certes! "From one who owed him much." He had
fitted the cap to a new head, the first of every month, for five
years, and still the list was not exhausted. Indeed, it would have
been hard for the General to look anywhere and not see some one whose
obligations to him far exceeded this thirty dollars a month. Could he
avoid being happy with such eyes?

But poor Madame Honorine! She who always gathered up the receipts, and
the "From one who owes you much"; who could at an instant's warning
produce the particular ones for any month of the past half-decade.
She kept them filed, not only in her armoire, but the scrawled
papers--skewered, as it were, somewhere else--where women from time
immemorial have skewered such unsigned papers. She was not original in
her thoughts--no more, for the matter of that, than the General was.
Tapped at any time on the first of the month, when she would pause
in her drudgery to reimpale her heart by a sight of the written
characters on the scrap of paper, her thoughts would have been found
flowing thus, "One can give everything, and yet be sure of nothing."

When Madame Honorine said "everything," she did not, as women in such
cases often do, exaggerate. When she married the General, she in
reality gave the youth of sixteen, the beauty (ah, do not trust the
denial of those wrinkles, the thin hair, the faded eyes!) of an angel,
the dot of an heiress. Alas! It was too little at the time. Had she in