would not have been left so by the author at the time of writing it, but only by some one careless of it, and at some time between its completion and the manifestly later date, when it was so carefully bestowed in its old-fashioned silken case and its inner wrapper of black paper.  The manuscript seemed genuine.  Maybe the name De Morainville is not, but was a convenient fiction of Alix herself, well understood as such by Francoise and Suzanne.  Everything points that way, as was suggested at once by Madame Sidonie de la Houssaye —­There!  I have let slip the name of my Creole friend, and can only pray her to forgive me!  “Tout porte a le croire” (Everything helps that belief), she writes; although she also doubts, with reason, I should say, the exhaustive completeness of those lists of the guillotined.  “I recall,” she writes in French, “that my husband has often told me the two uncles of his father, or grandfather, were guillotined in the Revolution; but though search was made by an advocate, no trace of them was found in any records.”

An assumed name need not vitiate the truth of the story; but discoveries made since, which I am still investigating, offer probabilities that, after all, the name is genuine.

We see, however, that an intention to deceive, were it supposable, would have to be of recent date.

Now let me show that an intention to deceive could not be of recent date, and at the same time we shall see the need of this minuteness of explanation.  Notice, then, that the manuscript comes directly from the lady who says she found it in a trunk of her family’s private papers.  A prominent paper-maker in Boston has examined it and says that, while its age cannot be certified to from its texture, its leaves are of three different kinds of paper, each of which might be a hundred years old.  But, bluntly, this lady, though a person of literary tastes and talent, who recognized the literary value of Alix’s history, esteemed original documents so lightly as, for example, to put no value upon Louisa Cheval’s thrilling letter to her brother.  She prized this Alix manuscript only because, being a simple, succinct, unadorned narrative, she could use it, as she could not Francoise’s long, pretty story, for the foundation of a nearly threefold expanded romance.  And this, in fact, she had written, copyrighted, and arranged to publish when our joint experience concerning Francoise’s manuscript at length readjusted her sense of values.  She sold me the little Alix manuscript at a price still out of all proportion below her valuation of her own writing, and counting it a mistake that the expanded romance should go unpreferred and unpublished.