"The beautiful Madame du Bourg?" repeated the young officer, inquiringly. "Was the fame of her beauty, then, so universal as to become proverbial?" "Yes, poor young creature," replied Madame de Serres, "though she had only resided in Paris since her union with the President du Bourg, about eighteen months ago. Her husband was nearly thirty years her senior, and the unhappy lady died after an illness of only two days, so I was informed yesterday, leaving an infant six months old. The unfortunate lady herself was scarcely more than a child, and, before her marriage, was the belle of Toulouse, Mademoiselle Gabrielle de Launay." [Illustration: DISASTROUS NEWS.] This disclosure, so simple and so brusque, of a terrible calamity to him, did not at once penetrate sharply and clearly the mind of Maurice de Serres. He was so utterly unprepared for the blow that for a moment he was unable to realise the disastrous news thus unconsciously imparted to him by his mother. He gazed at her with the air of a man who had not fully grasped the meaning of the words she had spoken, and asked her to repeat them. Then Madame de Serres, remembering that her son had been stationed at Toulouse a few years previously, and might consequently have met the President de Launay and his daughter, framed an evasive reply; but the instant she again named Mademoiselle de Launay, and reverted to the story of her sudden death, Maurice fell, with a cry of anguish, at his mother's feet, as though struck by a mortal wound--a livid pallor overspread his features, his breathing was that of a man struggling against suffocation, and he might have died, had not a flood of tears come to his relief.