Then, with frowning brows and set rigid lips, Pauline commenced walking up and down, covering with her long striding footsteps, so different from her usual easy, swimming gait, exactly the same amount of space at every turn, wheeling, apparently unconsciously, at the same point, treading almost in the same prints which she had previously made, keeping her eyes steadfastly fixed on the ground, and being totally unaware of all that was passing around her. She was a clear-headed as well as a strong-willed woman, accustomed to look life and its realities boldly in the face, and, unlike the majority of her countrymen and women, swift to detect the shallowness of sophistry when propounded by others, and careful never even to attempt to impose upon herself. Throughout her life, so long as she could remember, she had been in the habit of thinking-out any project of importance which had arisen in her career while walking to and fro, just as she was doing then. It was perhaps the sameness of the action, perhaps some reminiscence of her dream still lingering in her mind, that turned her memory to the last occasion when she had taken such thoughtful exercise; and the scene exactly as it occurred rose before her. The time, early morning, not much after six o'clock; the place, the Prado at Marseilles; the persons, a few belated blue-bloused workmen hurrying to their work, a few soldiers lounging about as only soldiers always seem to lounge when they are not on duty, a limonadière with her temple deposited on the ground by her side, while she washes the sparkling tin cups in a sparkling tin cups in a drinking-fountain; two or three water-carts pounding along and refreshingly sprinkling the white dusty road, two or three English grooms exercising horses, and she, Pauline Lunelle, dame du comptoir at the Restaurant du Midi, in the Cannebière, pacing up and down the Prado, and turning over in her mind a proposition on the acceptance or rejection of which depended her future happiness or misery. That proposition was a proposition of marriage, not by any means the first she had received. The handsome, black-eyed, black-haired, olive-skinned dame du comptoir was one of the reigning belles of the town, and the Restaurant du Midi was such a popular place of resort, that she never lacked admirers. All the breakfast-eaters, the smokers, the billiard-players, even the decorated old gentlemen who dropped in as regularly as clockwork every evening for a game of dominoes or tric-trac, paid their court to her, and in several cases this court was something more than the mere conventional hat-doffing or the few words of empty politeness whispered to her as she attended to the settlement of their accounts. Adolphe de Noailles--only a sous-lieutenant of artillery, to be sure, but a man of good family, and who, it was said, was looked upon with favour by Mademoiselle Krebs, daughter Of old Monsieur Krebs, the