themselves to pet certain abstract truths (circumstances don’t affect them in the least), like that priestess of Cotytto, who said to the magistrate, through her tears, ’I may have been unfortunate, but I’ve always been respectable!’ Sometimes principle gets the pull over passion, but, in such a case, regrets come as often afterward as remorse does in the reverse.  I was reading a French story the other day—­” He checked himself with a laugh.  “Bah!  I am in the prosaic vein, it seems, anecdoting like the old knave of clubs.”

“Will you go on?” Flora said, leaning over toward him, her eyes glittering in the firelight.

The thrill in her voice—­strangely contagious it was—­told how much she was interested.  I do not wonder at it.  There was only one man on earth for whom she had ever really cared—­he sat beside her then—­and, I believe, what attracted her most in him was the daring disregard of opinions, conventionalities, and more sacred things yet, which carried him on straight to the accomplishment of his thought or purpose.  In those days, if either were an obstacle, he flinched no more before a great moral law than at a big fence.

“Well,” Guy went on, “it is the simple history of Fernande, an ange dechue of the Quartier Breda.  She had formed a connection with a man who suited her perfectly in every way, and they went on in happy immorality, till she found out that Maurice had a wife somewhere, a very charming person, who loved him dearly; perhaps she thought that the possession of two such affections by one man was de luxe; at all events, she cut him at once, refusing consistently to see him again.  Maurice, after trying all other means to move her in vain, resorted to the expedient of a brain fever.  When his wife and mother saw him very near his end, they sent for Fernande as a last resource.  They ought to have preferred death to dishonor, of course; but, my dear Mrs. Bellasys, they were not strong-minded.  What would you have?  There are women and women.

“She came and nursed him faithfully; when he got better, though still very weak, she took advantage of his unprotected position to inflict on him the longest lectures, replete with good sense and good feeling, as to his conjugal duties, proprieties, and so forth.  He gave in at last, on the principle of ‘any thing for a quiet life,’ and promised to behave himself like a decent head of a family.  When the balance of power was thoroughly re-established, she left him, first entreating him, when he found himself really in love with his wife, and happy, to write and tell her so.  This was to be her reward, you know.  The others went to Italy, Fernande to a place she had in Brittany, where she put herself on a strict regime of penitence, attending matins regularly, and doing as much good in her neighborhood as Lady Bountiful, or—­my mother.  In about a twelvemonth the letter came; Maurice was devoted to his wife, and great on the point of domestic felicity.  Then Fernande went into her oratory and prayed.  What do you think was the substance of her prayer?”