She took the envenomed wreath to the window, to have a better light to examine it by. Alas! these were indeed, and beyond all doubt, the very roses and rosebuds whose steely thorns were wet with the blood-drops from a pair of pierced hearts. Whilst she, thus weeping and bowed beneath the weight of her woe, stunned and stupid rather than observant, stood at her window, it suddenly struck her as a strange circumstance that the torturer of her soul, though he had gone rattling down the stairs in a hurry with noise enough, had never gone out at the street-door. After a long and attentive watch, during which anxiety, closely bordering upon terror, assumed the _rôle_ of comforter and spake louder than her sorrow (the future, at the same time, driving the past out of view), the becrowned hairdresser came galloping home (the crown of his hat pointing heavenwards), and shouted to her in a mere parenthetical manner as he dashed by, "Madame the queen!" for his great idea was, that before anything else he should rush home, and there on the spot, and without a moment's delay, make proclamation of the kingship and queenship of four persons. There now devolves upon me the duty of conducting my readers to the corner where the Venner is cowering. From Lenette he had _descended_ (in two senses of that word) to the hairdresser's wife, one of that common class of women who never so much as dream of an infidelity all the year round--for no horse in all the kingdom is harder worked--and commit one only when there appears on the scene some tempter, whom they neither invite nor resist, probably forgetting all about the incident by the time next baking day comes round. On the whole, the superiority which the female middle-class is disposed to arrogate to itself over that of a higher rank, is just about equally great as it is questionable. There are not a great many tempters in the middle-class, and those there are are not of a very tempting sort.