quartier as apprentices to some ancient craft, he would stop him with the flat, trembling question, "Monsieur, did you by any chance recognize the—ah—the gentleman who called on my wife this afternoon?" and then he would walk down the street without waiting for a reply, while the children of the neighborhood, with the instinctive cruelty of the young, would run after him with loud shouts of—"Monsieur le marquis! Monsieur le marquis! You haven't got a wife!"—and gales of laughter which he did not seem to hear.
The story? Oh, yes—the reason for the dumb quest in the marquis s faded old eyes, for the hush which surrounded him, for the strange question with which he approached the hawk-faced young Corsicans—the tale of twenty years before which was known only to Father Gustave, the old priest who officiated at the Church of Saint-Jacques-de-Grâce.
In those days the marquis was young and handsome, the possessor of a princely fortune, and happily married to the young Countess Laetitia Pozzo-Paoli, the last descendant of an ancient impover-
