"I have never seen you so preoccupied as you seem to be this morning.
Do you not feel well? Have you received ill news from Paris? What ails
you?"

"I preoccupied?" replied Dorsenne. "You are mistaken. There is
absolutely nothing, I assure you." It was impossible to lie with more
apparent awkwardness, and if any one merited the scorn of Baron Hafner,
it was he. Hardly had Madame Gorka spoken, when he had, with the
rapidity of men of vivid imagination, seen Countess Steno and Maitland
surprised by Gorka, at that very moment, in some place of rendezvous,
and that surprise followed by a challenge, perhaps an immediate murder.
And, as Alba continued to laugh merrily, his presentiment of her sad fate
became so vivid that his face actually clouded over. He felt impelled to
ascertain, when she questioned him, how great a friendship she bore him.
But his effort to hide his emotion rendered his voice so harsh that the
young girl resumed:

"I have vexed you by my questioning?"

"Not the least in the world," he replied, without being able to find a
word of friendship. He felt at that moment incapable of talking, as they
usually did, in that tone of familiarity, partly mocking, partly
sentimental, and he added: "I simply think this exposition somewhat
melancholy, that is all." And, with a smile, "But we shall lose the
opportunity of having it shown us by our incomparable cicerone," and he
obliged her, by quickening her pace, to rejoin the group piloted by
Hafner through the magnificence of the almost deserted apartment.

"See," said the former broker of Berlin and of Paris, now an enlightened
amateur--" see, how that charlatan of a Fossati has taken care not to