well as you did to assist me now to refute."

"If it be really a calumny."

"Heavens, man! could you ever doubt that?" cried De Mauleon, with heat;
"ever doubt that I would rather have blown out my brains than allowed
them even to conceive the idea of a crime so base?"

"Pardon me," answered Louvier, meekly, "but I did not return to Paris for
months after you had disappeared. My mind was unsettled by the news that
awaited me at Aix; I sought to distract it by travel,--visited Holland
and England; and when I did return to Paris, all that I heard of your
story was the darker side of it. I willingly listen to your own account.
You never took, or at least never accepted, the Duchesse de ------'s
jewels; and your friend M. de ----- never sold them to one jeweller and
obtained their substitutes in paste from another?"

The Vicomte made a perceptible effort to repress an impulse of rage;
then reseating himself in his chair, and with that slight shrug of the
shoulder by which a Frenchman implies to himself that rage would be out
of place, replied calmly, "M. de N. did as you say, but of course not
employed by me, nor with my knowledge. Listen; the truth is this,--the
time has come to tell it. Before you left Paris for Aix I found myself
on the brink of ruin. I had glided towards it with my characteristic
recklessness, with that scorn of money for itself, that sanguine
confidence in the favour of fortune, which are vices common to every _roi
des viveurs_. Poor mock Alexanders that we spendthrifts are in youth!
we divide all we have among others, and when asked by some prudent
friend, 'What have you left for your own share?' answer, 'Hope.' I knew,
of course, that my patrimony was rapidly vanishing; but then my horses