circumstances were, like everything in the cosmopolitan world, as natural in their details as they were strange in their results. This friendship, like most lasting affections, began early, when the two women were but sixteen. They had ended their girlhood together in the intimacy of a convent, which is usually terminated at the entrance into society. But when these attachments endure, when they survive through absence, unaffected by difference of surroundings, or by new engagements, they become as instinctive and indestructible as family ties. When the two friends first met, the name of one was Ely de Sallach, the other, Louise Rodier of the old family of Catholic bankers, now extinct, the Rodier-Vimal. Certainly from their birthplaces, one the Château de Sallach in the heart of the Styrian Alps, the other the Hôtel Rodier in the Rue du Faubourg St. Honoré, it would seem that their paths of life must forever separate. A similar misfortune brought them together. They lost their mothers at the same time, and almost at once their fathers both married again. Each of the young girls, during the months that followed these second marriages, had had trouble with her step-mother; and each had finally been exiled to the Convent du Sacré-Cœur at Paris. The banker had chosen this establishment because he managed the funds and knew the superioress. General Sallach had been urged to this choice by his wife, who thus got rid of her step-daughter and gained a pretext for coming often to Paris. Entering the same day the old convent in the Rue de Varenne, the two orphans felt an attraction toward each other which their mutual confidences soon deepened into passionate friendship; and this friendship had lasted because it was based upon the profoundest depths of their characters and was strengthened by time.