daily life, that the criminality of her relations with Desforges scarcely ever seemed to strike Suzanne. What wrong was she doing Moraines, after all? Was she not his wife, and really attached to him? As for the Baron, it is true that he provided a very fair share of the luxuries in which she indulged. But what of that? May not a woman receive presents? If he paid a bill here, and a bill there, did that hurt anyone? She was his mistress, but their relationship was clothed in an air of respectability that made it seem almost like a legitimate union. She had become so accustomed to this compromise with her conscience that she considered herself, if not quite an honest woman, at least vastly superior in virtue to a number of her friends with whose various intrigues she was acquainted. If her conscience reproached her at all, it was for having deceived Desforges, two years after the beginning of their intimacy, with a swell clubman, whom she had carried off from one of her friends during the racing season at Deauville. This individual had, however, almost compromised her so fatally, and she had been so quick to detect in him the self-conceit of a mere flirt, that she had been only too glad to sever the connection at once. Thereupon she had sworn to restrict herself to the peaceful delights of her three-cornered arrangement--to Paul's gentlemanly ways and the Baron's Epicurean gallantry. And so carefully had she kept her resolve, and with such attention to outward appearance, that her good name was as safe as it could be in the enviable position to which her beauty raised her. She had rivals who were too well accustomed to drawing up accounts not to know that the Moraines were living at the rate of eighty thousand francs a year; 'and we knew them when they were almost beggars,' added these kind people. 'Scandal!' cried all the Baron's friends in chorus, and he had a way of making friends everywhere. 'Scandal!' cried the simple-minded people who are shocked by the tales of infamy that go the round of the drawing-rooms every night. 'Scandal!' added the wiseacres, who know that the best thing to do in Paris is to pretend to believe nothing, and to take people at their own value. Recollections of the innumerable services that Desforges had rendered her were no doubt running through Suzanne's mind as, seated before her toilet table, she exclaimed, 'The dear, kind friend!' Why, then, did the Baron's face, intelligent but worn, suddenly make way for another and a younger face, adorned with an ideal beard and lit up by a pair of dark blue eyes that reflected all the ardour of a virgin and enthusiastic soul? Why, whilst Céline's nimble fingers were busy with laces and hooks, would an inner voice continually murmur the sweet music of these four syllables--René Vincy? What secret temptation was she resisting when she whispered again and again the word, 'Impossible!'