* * * * * Outside, Mlle. Raindal began to pace back and forth in front of the ancient gate, walking briskly up and down the pavement, her neck shrunk in her shoulders and her shoulders hunched forward like those of a sentry struggling against the cold. At intervals she would stop and throw a searching glance towards the steps at the end of the courtyard. Through the window could be seen the meditative face of Pageot, which had at that distance and in the thick ochreous air of that dark November afternoon, almost the complexion of a yellow-fever patient. But as M. Raindal was not yet in sight, Thérèse took up her sentry walk again, her elbows close to her body, her hands crossed inside her plush muff. Gradually, as she paced back and forth, the line of her lips, almost as thin as a thread of rose silk, paled and all but vanished in a pouting expression. She was thinking of the approaching evening ordeal, the forced introduction which had been arranged for her at the house of M. Lemeunier de Saulvard, of the Department of Moral Sciences,--an introduction to an unknown man who would be presented to her at a dance, a "possible husband," the man who would have a right to her kisses, to her flesh, and would thereafter spend all his nights beside her. One more to reject! The ninth one in ten years! "A young savant of the greatest merit," Saulvard had written; "one of our rising hopes in Assyriology, M. Pierre Boerzell...." M. Boerzell! M. Boerzell! She repeated the harsh, barbarous name. Well, that "hope" would be no less sadly handicapped in the matter of good looks than the others before him! Probably something like the podgy little man carrying a barrister's case who was coming in her direction on the other side of the street! Instinctively she stopped to take a good look at the passer-by, her lips wickedly pursed and her eye aflame as at the sight of prey. Then, with lips relaxed in a disdainful smile, she turned about, and shrugging her shoulders, murmured: "Yes, probably one of that type!" She was suffering. As the wind bit her face, it seemed to her that something icy was gripping her heart. She remembered that other one--the man she had once lost--the runaway and defaulting fiancé, Albert Dastarac. Ten years had passed since then, but there were still nights when, in her maidenly dreams, she fancied that she felt his maddening embraces and the lingering fragrance of his lips.