only to make up my mind to it.

"'After three months of desperation rather than despair, the idea of
devoting myself to Honorine with God only in my secret, was one of
those poems which occur only to the heart of a lover through life and
death! Love must have its daily food. And ought I not to protect this
child, whose guilt was the outcome of my imprudence, against fresh
disaster--to fulfil my part, in short, as a guardian angel?--At the
age of seven months her infant died, happily for her and for me. For
nine months more my wife lay between life and death, deserted at the
time when she most needed a manly arm; but this arm,' said he, holding
out his own with a gesture of angelic dignity, 'was extended over her
head. Honorine was nursed as she would have been in her own home.
When, on her recovery, she asked how and by whom she had been
assisted, she was told--"By the Sisters of Charity in the neighborhood
--by the Maternity Society--by the parish priest, who took an interest
in her."

"'This woman, whose pride amounts to a vice, has shown a power of
resistance in misfortune, which on some evenings I call the obstinacy
of a mule. Honorine was bent on earning her living. My wife works! For
five years past I have lodged her in the Rue Saint-Maur, in a charming
little house, where she makes artificial flowers and articles of
fashion. She believes that she sells the product of her elegant
fancywork to a shop, where she is so well paid that she makes twenty
francs a day, and in these six years she had never had a moment's
suspicion. She pays for everything she needs at about the third of its
value, so that on six thousand francs a year she lives as if she had
fifteen thousand. She is devoted to flowers, and pays a hundred crowns
to a gardener, who costs me twelve hundred in wages, and sends me in a