Like a shipwrecked mariner clinging to a floating spar, she scanned the horizon with a despairing eye, and saw only angry and threatening clouds.

Time, perhaps, might bring her some relief.

Once it happened that six weeks went by, and she heard nothing from Chupin.  A month and a half!  What had become of him?  To Mme. Blanche this silence was as ominous as the calm that precedes the storm.

A line in a newspaper solved the mystery.

Chupin was in prison.

The wretch, after drinking more heavily than usual one evening, had quarrelled with his brother, and had killed him by a blow upon the head with a piece of iron.

The blood of the betrayed Lacheneur was visited upon the heads of his murderer’s children.

Tried by the Court of Assizes, Chupin was condemned to twenty years of hard labor, and sent to Brest.

But this sentence afforded the duchess no relief.  The culprit had written to her from his Paris prison; he wrote to her from Brest.

But he did not send his letters through the post.  He confided them to comrades, whose terms of imprisonment had expired, and who came to the Hotel de Sairmeuse demanding an interview with the duchess.

And she received them.  They told all the miseries they had endured “out there;” and usually ended by requesting some slight assistance.

One morning, a man whose desperate appearance and manner frightened her, brought the duchess this laconic epistle: 

“I am tired of starving here; I wish to make my escape.  Come to Brest; you can visit the prison, and we will decide upon some plan.  If you refuse to do this, I shall apply to the duke, who will obtain my pardon in exchange of what I will tell him.”

Mme. Blanche was dumb with horror.  It was impossible, she thought, to sink lower than this.

“Well!” demanded the man, harshly.  “What reply shall I make to my comrade?”

“I will go—­tell him that I will go!” she said, driven to desperation.

She made the journey, visited the prison, but did not find Chupin.

The previous week there had been a revolt in the prison, the troops had fired upon the prisoners, and Chupin had been killed instantly.

Still the duchess dared not rejoice.

She feared that her tormentor had told his wife the secret of his power.

“I shall soon know,” she thought.

The widow promptly made her appearance; but her manner was humble and supplicating.

She had often heard her dear, dead husband say that madame was his benefactress, and now she came to beg a little aid to enable her to open a small drinking saloon.

Her son Polyte—­ah! such a good son! just eighteen years old, and such a help to his poor mother—­had discovered a little house in a good situation for the business, and if they only had three or four hundred francs——­