Au revoir." With a tone and look of calm and fearless irony, the scholar thus spoke, and left the room; but when he was on the stairs, he paused, and caught at the balustrade,--the sickness as of terror at some danger past, or to be, came over him; and this contrast between the self-command, or simulation, which belongs to moral courage, and the feebleness of natural and constitutional cowardice, would have been sublime if shown in a noble cause.

In one so corrupt, it but betrayed a nature doubly formidable; for treachery and murder hatch their brood amidst the folds of a hypocrite's cowardice.
While thus the interview is going on between Dalibard and the conspirator, we must bestow a glance upon the Provencal's home.
In an apartment in one of the principal streets between the Boulevards and the Rue St.Honore, a boy and a woman sat side by side, conversing in whispers.

The boy was Gabriel Varney, the woman Lucretia Dalibard.
The apartment was furnished in the then modern taste, which affected classical forms; and though not without a certain elegance, had something meagre and comfortless in its splendid tripods and thin-legged chairs.

There was in the apartment that air which bespeaks the struggle for appearances,--that struggle familiar to those of limited income and vain aspirings, who want the taste which smooths all inequalities and gives a smile to home; that taste which affection seems to prompt, if not to create, which shows itself in a thousand nameless, costless trifles, each a grace.

No sign was there of the household cares or industry of women.