pedal extremities, incased in pink silk tights, emerged as from a cloud.
It was when you were resting on one of those occasions that you first observed the comte, now your husband, then one of the gayest of Parisian men about town. There he stood in the passage that led to the stables, tall, slender, and irreproachable in his closely buttoned overcoat and pearl-gray hat, wearing a sprig of lilac in his buttonhole and tapping his lips with the gold knob of his little walking-stick. He was there again the next day, and the day after that, and every day; and your eyes would sink in confusion as their glance met that distracted gaze of his, the despairing gaze of a man who has lost his head.
He had lost his head, indeed, but you were neither more nor less than an honest, good girl. You had become an orphan when five years old, your father, the man who did the pole act, having broken his neck in a fall. Then the people of the troupe adopted the little one of "the profession" and the old Parisian clown, Mistigris, taught you your French and a little reading and writing. From being the plaything and spoiled child of those honest mountebanks,—retaining their respect, too, through it all,—you became one of the glories of their enterprise. You were gaining a livelihood in an honest way, by the display of your physical proportions, it is true, but you were virtuous for all that, and you remember that evening when the comte offered you the turquoise set—in pretty cynical terms, it must be confessed—and you came near horsewhipping him in front of the elephants' stall in presence of all the company.
That was the spark in the powder magazine to that
