ambition to satisfy? The exile which had weighed so heavily on him, the loneliness he had endured had softened his nature and inclined his heart to tenderness: and he returned firmly resolved to overcome his aversion to his wife, and seek a reconciliation. “Old age is coming,” he thought. “If I have not the love of youth by my fireside, I may at least have a friend.” Blanche was astonished by his manner towards her when he returned. She almost believed she had found again the Martial of the old days at Courtornieu, but the realisation of the dream, so fondly cherished and so long deferred, now proved only another torture added to all the others. Still, Martial was striving to carry his plan into execution, when one day the following brief note came to him through the post: “Monsieur le Duc--If I were in your place, I would watch my wife.” It was only an anonymous letter, and yet on perusing it Martial’s blood mounted to his forehead. “Can she have a lover?” he thought. Then reflecting on his own conduct towards his wife since their marriage, he said to himself: “And if she has, what right have I to complain? Did I not tacitly give her back her liberty?” However, he was greatly troubled; and yet he did not once think of playing the spy. A few mornings afterwards, at about eleven o’clock, he was returning from a ride on horseback, and was not thirty paces from the Hotel de Sairmeuse when he suddenly perceived a lady hurriedly emerge from the house. She was very plainly dressed--entirely in black--but her whole appearance recalled that of the duchess in a striking fashion. “That’s certainly my wife,” thought Martial, “but why is she dressed in that fashion?” Then, yielding to a sudden impulse, he walked his horse up the Rue de Grenelle behind the woman in black. Blanche it was. She was tripping swiftly over the pavement, keeping her face shrouded by a thick veil and she never once turned her head. On reaching the Rue Taranne, she spoke hurriedly to a cab-driver on the stand, and then sprung into his vehicle. The Jehu was already on his box and he at once gave his bony horse such a vigorous cut of the whip that it was evident he had just been promised a princely gratuity. The cab had already turned into the Rue du Dragon, and Martial, ashamed of what he had already done and irresolute as to what he should do now was still tarrying at the corner of the Rue des Saints-Peres, where he had originally stopped his horse. Scarcely daring to entertain the suspicions that flitted across his mind, he tried to deceive himself. “After all,” he muttered, “it is of no use advancing. The cab’s a long way off by now, and I couldn’t overtake it.” Still he mechanically gave his horse the rein and when he reached the Croix Rouge he espied Blanche’s vehicle among a crowd of others. He recognized it by its green body and wheels striped with white. This decided him. The cab-driver had just managed to extricate