With a sigh, he rose, coughed, passed his hand over his eyes, and took his wife's arm.--(I felt sure she was his wife.) They passed slowly through the rooms together, and I lost sight of them. But not of his face--nor of hers. Sitting by the fountain outside the gaming saloons half an hour afterwards, I fell to musing about this strange couple. So young,--she scarcely more than a child, and he so ill and wasted! He had played with the manner of an old habitue, and she seemed used to finding him at the tables and leading him away. I made up my mind that I had stumbled on a romance, and resolved to hunt it down. At the table d'hote dinner in my hotel that evening I met a friend from Nice to whom I confided my curiosity. "I know," said he, "the young people of whom you speak; they are patients of Dr S. of Monaco, one of my most intimate acquaintances. He told me their story." "They," I interpolated,--" is the wife, then, also ill?" My friend smiled a little. "Not ill exactly, perhaps," he answered. "But you must have seen,--she will very shortly be a mother. And she is very young and delicate." "Tell me their story," I said, "since you know it. It is romantic, I am certain." "It is sad," he said, "and sadness suffices, I suppose, to constitute romance. The young man's name is Georges Saint-Cyr, and his family were `poor relations' of an aristocratic house. I say `were,' because they are all dead,-- his father, mother, and three sisters. The father died of tubercle, so did his daughters; the son, you see, inherits the same disease and will also die of it at no very distant time. Georges Saint-Cyr never found anybody to take him up in life. He was quite a lad when he lost his widowed mother, and his health was, even then, so bad and fitful that be could never work. He tried his best; but what chef can afford to employ a youth who is always sending in doctor's certificates to excuse his absence from his desk, and breaking down with headache or swooning on the floor in office-hours? He was totally unfit to earn his living, and the little money he had would not suffice to keep him decently. Moreover, in his delicate condition he positively needed comforts which to other lads would have been superfluous. Still he managed to struggle on for some five years, getting copying-work and what-not to do in his own rooms, till he had contrived, by the time he was twenty-two, to save a little money. His idea was to enter the medical profession and earn a livelihood by writing for scientific journals, for he had wits and was not without literary talent. He was lodging then in a cheap quarter of Paris not far from the Ecole de Medecine. Well, the poor boy passed his baccalaureat and entered on his first year. He got through that pretty well, but then came the hospital work; and then, once more he broke down. The rising at six o'clock on bitter cold winter mornings, the going out into the bleak early