offering him a pinch of snuff, and a lad appeared with a bunch of violets
from Madame Chalice, the dissentients were cast in shadow, and had no
longer courage to doubt.

Madame Chalice had been merely whimsical in sending these violets, which
her gardener had brought her that very morning.

"It will help along the pretty farce," she had said to herself; and then
she sat her down to read Napoleon's letters to Josephine, and to wonder
that a woman could have been faithless and vile with such a man. Her
blood raced indignantly in her veins as she thought of it. She admired
intellect, supremacy, the gifts of temperament, deeds of war and
adventure beyond all. As yet her brain was stronger than her feelings;
there had been no breakers of emotion in her life. A wife, she had no
child; the mother in her was spent upon her husband, whose devotion,
honour, name, and goodness were dear to her. Yet--yet she had a world of
her own; and reading Napoleon's impassioned letters to his wife, written
with how great homage! in the flow of the tide washing to famous battle-
fields, an exultation of ambition inspired her, and the genius of her
distinguished ancestors set her heart beating hard. Presently, her face
alive with feeling, a furnace in her eyes, she repeated a paragraph from
Napoleon's letters to Josephine:

The enemy have lost, my dearest, eighteen thousand men, prisoners,
killed, and wounded. Wurmzer has nothing left but to throw himself
into Mantua. I hope soon to be in your arms. I love you to
distraction. All is well. Nothing is wanting to your husband's
happiness, save the love of Josephine.

She sprang to her feet. "And she, wife of a hero, was in common intrigue