“Sit down here,” said Louison, placing herself on a couch, and tossing one of its cushions to her feet, on which the Indian crouched like a dog. “I will tell you just what you are to do—and make sure you do it.” “Zamara listens,” murmured the dwarf, feeling a warm glow of wine burning through the duskiness of his cheek. Thus, with his great, black eyes half closed, and his features relaxing into something like repose, he sat inertly, while Louison went into the detail of her plans, in which he was to act the part of a traitor and a spy upon the only real friend he had ever known. Persuasion or bribery might have failed to turn that pampered creature into the foul ingrate he became. But Zamara had seen awful deeds during the riots of Paris, that the very thought of danger from that quarter made a craven of him. His own poor life was the only real possession that he had on earth; when that was threatened, all I that was good and honest in his nature gave way. He arose from the cushion the abject slave of the woman whom he regarded with crouching fear and deadly hate. “You will know where to find me, for this is my home.” Zamara looked around the room with contempt in his heart. The flimsy curtains, knotted back with tufts of faded pink ribbon; those poor plants in the window, pining for want of a little water; the table, littered over with Jacobin pamphlets and rebellious journals; the pictures on the walls, those mirrors in tarnished gilding, the faded silk of the couch, dead flowers in the vases, all bespoke the reckless desire of their owner to ape the luxury she pretended to despise. Zamara saw this, and his miserable little heart filled with contempt of the woman he feared. He had lived too long in the regal splendor of the little Trianon not to sneer in his soul at the vulgar mockery of elegance affected by this woman of the people. “You will know where to find me,” said Louison, again, looking around her room with great satisfaction. “It is not likely that you can forget, having once been here.” “No; I shall never forget,” answered the dwarf, with a gleam in his eye, and something almost like a sneer in his voice, “never!” Louison had been terribly wounded in her vanity by the position in which she discovered Theroigne de Mericourt and Du Berry. Those two women, both almost as worthless as herself, had become her bane since the night she had seen Mirabeau smiling on them as guests of a table to which she was not invited. She had heard of the elegance which Du Berry still kept up, and knew that Theroigne was following her example, with the fearless audacity of a bold, beautiful woman, ready to risk her power rather than sacrifice one iota of the personal luxury which she considered as her right.