Page:Lippincotts Monthly Magazine-13.pdf/269

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268
THE NEW HYPERION.
[Mar.

come in Belgian society to French refugees, being more used to fellows that have jumped their bail or to gentlemen of the Rochefort order than they are to Don Quixotes. It was too bad, though, the things they dared to drop about that baby and its supposed father. 'We had better part,' said the landlord who lodged him near the cemetery: 'there too many of your family in our faubourg."

"Was he obliged to move away, then, from the grave he had tended generously?"

"It was of the less importance, for his banishment from French soil was repealed Before departing he came

LADDER OR BRIDGE?

more to the churchyard of Laaken. He left a considerable sum with the sexton, making him promise to keep the place in his special care. Nothing could be more handsome of Fortnoye."

—For it was again of Fortnoye, the eternal, the inevitable Fortnoye, that the tale was told. I had been repeating to Grandstone his riddling words about an approaching matrimonal project on his part. The former continued:

"Do you fancy that even if he wants to marry, a girl who goes over the country with undecipherable and mysterious babies is the wife for our whimsical, scrupulous Paladin? It was a pure infamy though, to invent that coarse slander about him and the child."

"But who is the supposed mother of the infant?"

"Why, don't you see? Her godmother is well known at Brussels, where she shut her door against the adventress. Of course it is your pretty hostess of Carlsruhe."

"What! Francine Joliet? The (illegible text)