day I am very quietly employed at breakfast, when my valet ushers in a
masked personage, and behold my gentlewoman again! Human endurance will
not go too far, and this was a case which required one to be in a
passion one way or the other; so I feigned anger, and talked with
exceeding dignity about the predicament I had been placed in the day
before.

"Such must always be the case," said I, "when one is weak enough to form
an attachment to a lady who encourages so many others!"

"For your sake," said the tender dame, "for your sake, then, I will
discard them all!"

There was something grand in this. it might have elicited a few strokes
of pathos, when--never was there anything so strangely provoking--the
Abbe Dubois himself was heard in my anteroom. I thought this chance,
but it was more; the good Abbe, I afterwards found, had traced cause for
suspicion, and had come to pay me a visit of amatory police. I opened
my dressing-room door, and thrust in the lady. "There," said I, "are
the back-stairs, and at the bottom of the back-stairs is a door."

Would not any one have thought this hint enough? By no means; this very
tall lady stooped to the littleness of listening, and, instead of
departing, stationed herself by the keyhole.

I never exactly learned whether Dubois suspected the visit his mistress
had paid me, or whether he merely surmised, from his spies or her
escritoire, that she harboured an inclination towards me; in either case
his policy was natural, and like himself. He sat himself down, talked
of the Regent, of pleasure, of women, and, at last, of this very tall