at the balustrade,--the sickness as of terror at some danger past, or to
be, came over him; and this contrast between the self-command, or
simulation, which belongs to moral courage, and the feebleness of natural
and constitutional cowardice, would have been sublime if shown in a noble
cause. In one so corrupt, it but betrayed a nature doubly formidable;
for treachery and murder hatch their brood amidst the folds of a
hypocrite's cowardice.

While thus the interview is going on between Dalibard and the
conspirator, we must bestow a glance upon the Provencal's home.

In an apartment in one of the principal streets between the Boulevards
and the Rue St. Honore, a boy and a woman sat side by side, conversing in
whispers. The boy was Gabriel Varney, the woman Lucretia Dalibard. The
apartment was furnished in the then modern taste, which affected
classical forms; and though not without a certain elegance, had something
meagre and comfortless in its splendid tripods and thin-legged chairs.
There was in the apartment that air which bespeaks the struggle for
appearances,--that struggle familiar to those of limited income and vain
aspirings, who want the taste which smooths all inequalities and gives a
smile to home; that taste which affection seems to prompt, if not to
create, which shows itself in a thousand nameless, costless trifles, each
a grace. No sign was there of the household cares or industry of women.
No flowers, no music, no embroidery-frame, no work-table. Lucretia had
none of the sweet feminine habits which betray so lovelily the whereabout
of women. All was formal and precise, like rooms which we enter and
leave,--not those in which we settle and dwell.

Lucretia herself is changed; her air is more assured, her complexion more
pale, the evil character of her mouth more firm and pronounced.