“Love him or not makes but little difference. From the moment she married him she was bound to be faithful. The story says that he was old, and that seems to me an additional reason for respecting him more, and for preventing other people from laughing at him. The old man did right to kill them,—it was only what they deserved!” She spoke with great violence. Her affection as a daughter, her honor as a woman, influenced her words, and she judged and spoke with that cruel candor that belongs to youth, and which judges life from the ideal it has itself created, without comprehending in the least any of the terrible exigencies which may arise. Clarisse did not answer. She turned her face away, and was looking out of the window. Jack, with his eyes on his book, thought of what he had been reading. Here, amid these humble surroundings, this immortal legend of guilty love had echoed “through the corridors of time,” and after four hundred years had awakened a response. Suddenly through the open casement came a cry, “Hats! hats to sell!” Jack started to his feet and ran into the street; but quick as he was, Clarisse had preceded him, and as he went out, she came in, crushing a letter into her pocket. The pedler was far down the street. “Bélisaire!” shouted Jack. The man turned. “I was sure it was you,” continued Jack, breathlessly. “Do you come here often?” “Yes, very often;” and then Bélisaire added, after a moment, “How happens it, Master Jack, that you are here, and have left that pretty house?” The boy hesitated, and the pedler seeing this, continued,— “That was a famous ham, was it not? And that lovely lady, who had such a gentle face, she was your mother, was she not?” Jack was so happy at hearing her name mentioned that he would have lingered there at the corner of the street for an hour, but Bélisaire said he was in haste, that he had a letter to deliver, and must go. When Jack entered the house, Madame Rondic met him at the door. She was very pale, and said, in a low voice, with trembling lips,— “What did you want of that man?” The child answered that he had known him at Etiolles, and that they had been talking of his parents. She uttered a sigh of relief. But that whole evening she was even quieter than usual, and her head seemed bowed by more than the weight of her blonde braids. CHAPTER XIV. A MIDNIGHT INTERVIEW. “Chateau des Aulnettes.