his conduct she nevertheless gave him no cause of complaint against herself.  And when he died of a fever brought on through over-indulgence in vice, she conformed to all the strictest usages of society,—­wore her solemn widow’s black for more than the accustomed period,—­and then cast it off,—­not to dash into her fashionable “circle” again with a splurge of colour, but rather to glide into it gracefully, a vision of refinement, arrayed in such soft hues as may be seen in some rare picture; and she took complete possession of it by her own unaided charm.  No one could really tell whether she grieved for D’Agramont’s death or not; no one but herself knew how she had loved him,—­no one guessed what agonies of pain and shame she had endured for his sake, nor how she had wept herself half blind with despair when he died.  All this she shut up in her own heart, but the working of the secret bitterness within her had made a great change in her disposition.  Her nature, once as loving and confiding as that of a little child, had been so wronged in its tenderest fibres that now she could not love at all.

“Why is it,” she would ask herself, “that I am totally unable to care for any living creature?  That it is indifferent to me whether I see any person once, or often, or never?  Why are all men like phantoms, drifting past my soul’s immovability?”

The answer to her query would be, that having loved greatly once and been deceived, it was impossible to love again.  Some women,—­the best, and therefore the unhappiest—­are born with this difficult temperament.

Now, as she rode quietly along, sometimes allowing her horse to prance upon the turf for the delight of its dewy freshness, she was weaving quite a brilliant essay on modern morals out of the scene she had witnessed at the Church of the Lorette that morning.  She well knew how to use that dangerous weapon, the pen,—­she could wield it like a wand to waken tears or laughter with equal ease, and since her husband’s death she had devoted a great deal of time to authorship.  Two witty novels, published under a nom-de-plume had already startled the world of Paris, and she was busy with a third.  Such work amused her, and distracted her from dwelling too much on the destroyed illusions of the past.  The Figaro snatched eagerly at everything she wrote; and it was for the Figaro that she busied her brain now, considering what she should say of the Abbe Vergniaud’s confession.

“It is wisest to be a liar and remain in the Church? or tell the truth and go out of the Church?” she mused, “Unfortunately, if all priests told the truth as absolutely as the Abbe did this morning we should have hardly any of them left.”

She laughed a little, and stroked her horse’s neck caressingly.

“Good Rex!  You and your kind never tell lies; and yet you are said to have no souls.  Now I wonder why we, who are mean and cunning and treacherous and hypocritical should have immortal souls, while horses and dogs who are faithful and kind and honest should be supposed to have none.”