cannot so lightly bear to set you free."

"My dearest," said he with a smile, "I have three days' holiday, and
am supposed to be twenty leagues away from Paris."



A few days after this anniversary of the 6th of May, Mademoiselle de
Bellefeuille hurried off one morning to the Rue Saint-Louis, in the
Marais, only hoping she might not arrive too late at a house where she
commonly went once a week. An express messenger had just come to
inform her that her mother, Madame Crochard, was sinking under a
complication of disorders produced by constant catarrh and rheumatism.

While the hackney coach-driver was flogging up his horses at
Caroline's urgent request, supported by the promise of a handsome
present, the timid old women, who had been Madame Crochard's friends
during her later years, had brought a priest into the neat and
comfortable second-floor rooms occupied by the old widow. Madame
Crochard's maid did not know that the pretty lady at whose house her
mistress so often dined was her daughter, and she was one of the first
to suggest the services of a confessor, in the hope that this priest
might be at least as useful to herself as to the sick woman. Between
two games of boston, or out walking in the Jardin Turc, the old
beldames with whom the widow gossiped all day had succeeded in rousing
in their friend's stony heart some scruples as to her former life,
some visions of the future, some fears of hell, and some hopes of
forgiveness if she should return in sincerity to a religious life. So
on this solemn morning three ancient females had settled themselves in
the drawing-room where Madame Crochard was "at home" every Tuesday.