"It seems so." "Oh! I will go at once. The good doctor." "But he will have gone by now!" exclaimed Julie. The Marquis, standing in the middle of the room, was tying the handkerchief over his head. He looked complacently at himself in the glass. "What has become of the servants is more than I know," he remarked. "I have rung the bell for Charles, and he has not answered it. And your maid is not here either. Ring for her. I should like another blanket on my bed to-night." "Pauline is out," the Marquise said drily. "What, at midnight!" exclaimed the General. "I gave her leave to go to the Opera." "That is funny!" returned her husband, continuing to undress. "I thought I saw her coming upstairs." "She has come in then, of course," said Julie, with assumed impatience, and to allay any possible suspicion on her husband's part she pretended to ring the bell. The whole history of that night has never been known, but no doubt it was as simple and as tragically commonplace as the domestic incidents that preceded it. Next day the Marquise d'Aiglemont took to her bed, nor did she leave it for some days. "What can have happened in your family so extraordinary that every one is talking about your wife?" asked M. de Ronquerolles of M. d'Aiglemont a short time after that night of catastrophes. "Take my advice and remain a bachelor," said d'Aiglemont. "The curtains of Helene's cot caught fire, and gave my wife such a shock that it will be a twelvemonth before she gets over it; so the doctor says. You marry a pretty wife, and her looks fall off; you marry a girl in blooming health, and she turns into an invalid. You think she has a passionate temperament, and find her cold, or else under her apparent coldness there lurks a nature so passionate that she is the death of you, or she dishonors your name. Sometimes the meekest of them will turn out crotchety, though the crotchety ones never grow any