"They had been married for some years, and had grown weary of hoping for an heir to the ancient name which, if they had died without posterity, would have become extinct. Disappointed in his hope of perpetuating his noble race, the duke had grown indifferent to his beautiful wife; nay, something worse than indifference had arisen--something bordering on dislike, which, in spite of his efforts, he was unable to conceal. The duchess came of a house almost as noble as that of her husband. She was a haughty and imperious woman, and she was not slow to perceive this change in the manner of the duke. She discovered that in the very prime of her youth and beauty she was despised by her husband. The bitterness of this discovery changed her very nature. Every day she grew more haughty, more exacting, more capricious. She shut herself from the gay world in which she had been admired, and abandoned herself to a mute but terrible despair." "Poor woman, she suffered!" murmured Camillia. "She did. She was wronged, but it did not make her more pitiful to others when their time of suffering came. It hardened her nature, and made her merciless, as all injustice must ever do. The duke observed this gloomy silence--this dumb despair. He could not restore to her an affection which he no longer felt; but he sought to revive her spirits by change of scene, and by those hollow pleasures which are the sole resource of the idle." "Vain solace! Poor lady, she was indeed to be pitied." "Ay, but her haughty soul would have rejected pity as the direst wrong. The duke left Italy, and took her to Paris, where, in the midst of the gay and frivolous, she might forget her domestic griefs; but in France, as in Italy, she refused to share in the pleasures of the world of rank and fashion, and obstinately shut herself in her own chamber." "Yet she did not die! Strange that such sorrow could not kill!" "Sorrow does not kill. Even her beauty suffered no diminution. It was still in the full splendor of its luxuriance, dark, proud, commanding, queen-like. Have you ever heard, Camillia Moraquitos, of the secrets of Paris? Have you ever heard of the mysteries of that wonderful city, in which almost every street has its secret known only to the initiated in the winding ways of civilized life? Three months after the arrival of the duke and duchess in Paris, an event occurred which changed the whole current of their lives." "And that event was--"