“Charming! Ha! ha! Fontaine will be rapturously happy.” “Wait a minute. Don’t laugh in that dismal manner. She is determined, of course, to marry M. Duval; but she thinks, by coming to this house, she can force Fontaine to give her money rather than betray her presence to his _fiancée_. Well, I found this out,--no matter how,--and I said this morning to Fleury--” “To Fleury!” “To Fleury. He is no more dead than you or I. He has been living at my house for a month past. I said, ‘I won’t keep your secret any longer. I’ll tell your wife that you are alive.’ Oh, he cried like a baby at that.” Marsac seized her hands, and could only cry breathlessly, “Go on! go on!” “It was this way. About a month ago Fleury came walking into my place and asked for lodgings. I said, ‘Why, you were drowned.’ He said, ‘I wasn’t.’ I said, ‘Your wife thinks so.’ He said, ‘I hope she will keep on thinking so.’ I hadn’t the heart to betray the poor creature, so I said nothing until I heard about this new move of his wife’s, but then I determined to tell you; and I have him around the corner, in a wine-shop, where he is crying and drinking; and you must come with me.” Two minutes later Delphine saw, from an upper window, Madame Schmid parading down the street, with Marsac gallantly holding the yellow parasol over her red bonnet, and attending her as if she were a duchess. That, then, was the woman Marsac loved! Delphine, pale and agonised, returned to the drawing-room. There came a rustle of draperies from the conservatory, and Claire flitted in with Fontaine. One look at their happy faces told that Uncle Maurice’s fortune had made no figure in their love affair. “What do you think, Delphine,” asked Claire, with her hand still lying in Fontaine’s,--“this foolish boy has not a fortune, after all; and he has known it for some time, and dared not tell me. It seems that when the report of his Uncle Maurice’s death came, some one started the story in the newspapers about the fortune, and Auguste did not have the nerve to contradict it. Besides, it might have been true, for he had an Uncle Maurice in America. And this very morning Uncle Maurice arrived in Paris, and was directed here to find Auguste. And Auguste says the old man looks very poor and friendless, but cheery and glad to get back to France; and dear, kind Monsieur Marsac was so good to the old man, and made Auguste kind to him too. So he has gone to their apartment to make ready to come and see us. I shall be just as nice to him as I can be, and I shall make papa be the same.” “Claire, you have the dearest heart in the world,” burst out Delphine, generously forgetting her own misery; “and I love and respect you the more for not caring whether Auguste has a fortune or not.” “But with his talents,” answered Claire, proudly, “a fortune will be his. We can live well enough on his pictures, his plays, and his articles in the newspapers.”