The mother made a vague sign, which Caroline's watchful eye
understood, for she was silent to let her mother speak.

"They brought a priest--to hear my confession, as they said.--Beware,
Caroline!" cried the old woman with an effort, "the priest made me
tell him your benefactor's name."

"But who can have told you, poor mother?"

The old woman died, trying to look knowingly cunning. If Mademoiselle
de Bellefeuille had noted her mother's face she might have seen what
no one ever will see--Death laughing.

To enter into the interests that lay beneath this introduction to my
tale, we must for a moment forget the actors in it, and look back at
certain previous incidents, of which the last was closely concerned
with the death of Madame Crochard. The two parts will then form a
whole--a story which, by a law peculiar to life in Paris, was made up
of two distinct sets of actions.

Towards the close of the month of November 1805, a young barrister,
aged about six-and-twenty, was going down the stairs of the hotel
where the High Chancellor of the Empire resided, at about three
o'clock one morning. Having reached the courtyard in full evening
dress, under a keen frost, he could not help giving vent to an
exclamation of dismay--qualified, however, by the spirit which rarely
deserts a Frenchman--at seeing no hackney coach waiting outside the
gates, and hearing no noises such as arise from the wooden shoes or
harsh voices of the hackney-coachmen of Paris. The occasional pawing
of the horses of the Chief Justice's carriage--the young man having