If you are ill-advised enough to espouse an heiress, you are pretty sure, sooner or later, to have her money flung in your face. Gabrielle had been so full of delicate tact with regard to the dangerous point, that Clovis had never been troubled about it until urgency had impelled de Brèze to twist the screw, and under the wrench he continued to wince and writhe. Calm and dreamy as he was, he had never overtly done anything to vex his wife--had drifted, and then been towed into troubled waters, whose turbidness, now that attention was called to them, was a matter for surprise. He had struggled in his feeble way with conscience, and, the governess assisting, had succeeded in lulling it to rest; and it was very distressing to his vanity that the sleeper should be so roughly wakened. Is it not always humiliating to be treated like a peccant school-boy? I regret to state that the abbé, when in conference with the marquis, adroitly added to the chafing, by covert scratches and the insertion of little pins. "To a man of spirit," he would remark, deprecatingly, "it is painful to be led by the nose; none the less so, when the holder of the tongs happens to be the one whose duty is obedience." On such occasions, Clovis would turn to his brother with puzzled wrinklings of the brow that were piteous and yet ludicrous. "What am I to do?" he would groan. "The situation, as you say, is horrible; but I don't see a way out of the difficulty." Then the abbé would tap his shoulder and murmur, sighing, "Poor fellow. I pity you with all my being, but for all our sakes must exhort you to be civil to madame. Her wish is law to her papa. If she chose to ask the old scamp to eject us into the road, what else could we do but go?" Thus it will be seen that Gabrielle's sanguine expressions of gratitude were somewhat premature. The disease of an importunate love for her spouse had submitted to surgical treatment, which was an advantageous change for both; but she guessed nothing of the Nessus shirt, that under the fine linen excoriated the tender skin of the lymphatic sensualist, or dreamed of the effect on his tissues of the abbé's little pins. Affairs stood thus, when the marquis's _bête noire_ appeared again to stir the wound in his vanity which never ceased to fester. Actually, under the spring sunshine, the dusty berline was again visible, crawling down the road with its load of dust, and M. Galland peering from the window. Clovis shot at his wife a look of angry suspicion, but did not fail to mark by her face, that this time the apparition was unexpected. He could see plainly that if there was to be another screw turn, it was not at her instance or suggestion. So much was evident, and the hot and hasty words which rose died upon his lips. The old rascal had determined to do something disagreeable on his own account. What?