emotions, the coals of the heart-fires which death alone extinguishes,
when he commands the tenant to vacate.

Honorine's hands chilled with the ice of sixteen as she approached
scissors to the white mustache and beard. When her finger-tips brushed
those lips, still well formed and roseate, she felt it, strange to
say, on her lips. When she asperged the warm water with cologne,--it
was her secret delight and greatest effort of economy to buy this
cologne,--she always had one little moment of what she called
faintness--that faintness which had veiled her eyes, and chained her
hands, and stilled her throbbing bosom, when as a bride she came from
the church with him. It was then she noticed the faint fragrance of
the cologne bath. Her lips would open as they did then, and she would
stand for a moment and think thoughts to which, it must be confessed,
she looked forward from month to month. What a man he had been! In
truth he belonged to a period that would accept nothing less from
Nature than physical beauty; and Nature is ever subservient to the
period. If it is to-day all small men, and to-morrow gnomes and
dwarfs, we may know that the period is demanding them from Nature.

When the General had completed--let it be called no less than the
ceremony of--his toilet, he took his chocolate and his _pain de
Paris_. Honorine could not imagine him breakfasting on anything but
_pain de Paris._ Then he sat himself in his large arm-chair before his
escritoire, and began transacting his affairs with the usual--

"But where is that idiot, that dolt, that sluggard, that snail, with
my mail?" Honorine, busy in the breakfast-room:

[Illustration: "WHERE IS THAT IDIOT, THAT DOLT, THAT SLUGGARD, THAT