Not at all; her woman says, she never saw her so contented; for my own part, I am charitable, and hope she may yet be reclaimed, for she has not a bad heart; she is generous and charitable; and yet she has insisted upon having all her fortune restored, and has left her husband in absolute want. You will tell me he is mad and foolish, has ruined himself nobody knows how, and has just suffered the disgrace of being degraded in the army. I own they have taken away his commission: yes, he has lost his regiment; but yet, I say, a husband is a husband. The poor man wrote to her about a month since to beg her assistance, but no! she told him plainly, no! ’Tis very hard though!---I have all these things from the best authority; I don’t talk by hearsay; I have been fifteen years in this house, and, I thank my God, nobody could ever say I was a tatler, or a vender of scandal. The Touriere continued at her own ease praising herself; I had not the power of interruption left. She was loudly called for, kept talking all the way she went, and in a few minutes returned. It was the relation of a young Novice who takes the veil to-morrow, that wanted me, said she. Ah! now; there; there is a true convert! A call of grace! Gives fifty thousand francs (2083l. sterling) to the convent! You ought to see the ceremony: our Boarders will all be there, and you can take a peep through the church window. At what o’clock will it begin? Three in the afternoon. The Novice is as beautiful as an angel, and is only twenty. Had she not lost her lover and her father in the same year, the would never have attended to the blessed inspiration of the Spirit. How good Providence is to us! Her father died first, and her lover, who was imprisoned at Saumur, about five months after, of a broken heart, as it is thought. What was his name? cried I, in an agony not to be described. The Marquis of Clainville, replied the Touriere, and our novice is called Mademoiselle d’Elbene. This last sentence went with inexpressible torture to my heart. I rose suddenly, and ran out with an exclamation that threw the Touriere into astonishment and terror. Arrived at my lodgings, I threw myself upon the sopha, penetrated, torn, and confounded at all that I had heard. The veil was rent away, the illusion passed, I knew at length the extent of my misery; saw to what a point my extravagant conduct had stained my wife’s reputation; felt how impossible it was for this innocent victim of my destruction truly to pardon the injury I had done her, by destroying the most precious thing a woman possesses; and owned, that the unjust contempt with which the world treated her, ought incessantly to reanimate her resentment against me its author. To her virtue alone could I now attribute her generous manner of acting.