"After renewed supplications, M. Ferrand consented to my prayers: I regarded it as a great favor, so frightful was my condition. Yet, for the five months which followed this cruel scene, I was very unhappy, very cruelly treated. Sometimes only M. Germain, whom I saw but seldom, interrogated me with kindness on the subject of my sorrows; but shame forbade my confession." "Is it not about this time that he came to live here?" "Yes, sir. He wished for a room near the Temple or the Arsenal; there was one to be let here, it suited him." "And you never thought of confiding your sorrows to M. Germain?" asked Rudolph. "No, sir; he was also a dupe of M. Ferrand's; he said he was hard and exacting, but he thought him the most honest man in the world. I passed these five months in tears, in continual agony. With care, I had concealed my situation from all eyes, but I could hope to do so no longer. The future was for me most dreadful; M. Ferrand had declared he would not keep me any longer with him. I was thus about to be deprived of the small resource that aided our family to live. Cursed, driven away by my father--for, after the falsehoods that I had told him to dissipate his suspicions, he would not believe me to be the victim of M. Ferrand--what was to become of me? where was I to fly? where to find a refuge? I had then a very wicked idea. I confess this, sir, because I wish to conceal nothing, even that which may cast suspicion on me, and also to show you to what an extremity I was reduced by the cruelty of M. Ferrand. If I had yielded to a fatal thought, would he not have been an accomplice of my crime?" After a moment's silence, Louise resumed, with an effort, and in a trembling voice, "I had heard from the portress that a quack lived in the house--and--" She could not finish. Rudolph remembered that at his first call on Mrs. Pipelet he had received from the postman, in her absence, a letter written on coarse paper, in a disguised hand, and on which he had remarked the traces of tears. "And you did write him, unhappy child, three days since? On this letter you have wept; your writing was disguised." Louise looked at Rudolph with affright. "How do you know, sir?" "Calm yourself. I was alone in the lodge of Mrs. Pipelet when this letter was handed in, and it was my chance to receive it." "Yes, sir; in this letter, without signature, I wrote to M. Bradamanti, that, not daring to come to him, I begged he would meet me that evening near the Château dead. I was half crazy. I wished to ask his fearful advice. I left my master's house to meet him; but my reason returned. I regained the house; I did not see him. Thus the scene took place, from the consequences of which I am now suffering-- M. Ferrand believing me gone out for two hours, while after a very short time I returned."