lofty features, burning eye and fine sentiments. Healed, able to resume
his journey and offered a loan to make it smooth, he effusively uttered
a declaration of gratitude and devotion, and vowed to remain the slave
of the man who had saved him from a miserable death.

A good work rarely goes unrewarded. Antonino, who had never touched a
piece of colored chalk to a black stone, soon revealed strong gift as a
draftsman and served his new master with brightness and taste.

Left lonely by his wife, each day more and more estranged, Felix loved
to labor with the youth in the tasks to both congenial. That Césarine
should grow jealous would be natural, but it was pique that she felt
toward Felix. In Antonino, she saw the possible instrument of her
vengeance. His good looks, fervid temperament, youthful
impressionability, all conspired in her favor as well as the innate
artistic craving which had at the first sight lifted her on a pedestal
as his ideal of the woman to be idolized.

Nevertheless, the vagabond had a stronger spirit than she anticipated,
and the emotion which she set down as timidity, and which protected him
from the baseness of deceiving his benefactor, was due to honor. She
flattered herself that she could pluck the fruit at any time, and, since
this moneyless youth could not in the least appease her yearning for
inordinate luxury, she cast about for another conquest.

Clemenceau would not hear of his home being turned into the pandemonium
of a country-house receiving all "the society that amuses," and rigidly
restricted his wife from visiting where she would meet the odd medley in
the suburbs of Paris. Retired opera-singers, Bohemians who have made a
fortune by chance, superseded politicians, officials who have perfected