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“Always there!” commented a sharp American belle of mature years, “like an ugly little conscience.”

Edmondstone’s first meeting with his cousin after his return to Paris was accidental. He had rather put off visiting her, and one night, entering a crowded room, he found himself standing behind a girl’s light figure and staring at an abundance of reddish-brown hair. When, almost immediately the pretty head to which this hair belonged turned with a slow, yet involuntary-looking movement toward him, he felt that he became excited without knowing why.

“Ah, Bertha!” he exclaimed.

She smiled a little and held out her hand, and he immediately became conscious of M. Villefort being quite near and regarding him seriously.

It was the perverseness of fate that he should find in Bertha Villefort even more than he had once seen in Bertha Trent, and there had been a time when he had seen a great deal in Bertha Trent. In the Trent household he had been a great favorite. No social evening or family festivity had seemed complete without his presence. The very children had felt that they had a claim upon his good-humor, and his tendency to break forth into whimsical frolic. Good Mrs. Trent had been wont to scold him and gossip with him. He had read his sonnets and metaphysical articles to Bertha, and occasionally to the rest; in fact, his footing in the family was familiar and firmly established. But since her marriage Bertha had become a little incomprehensible, and on that account a little more interesting. He was sure she had developed, but could not make out in what direction. He found occasion to reproach her sometimes with the changes he found in her.

“There are times when I hardly know you,” he would say, “you are so finely orthodox and well controlled. It was not so with you once, Bertha. Don’t–don’t become that terrible thing, a fine lady, and worse still, a fine lady who is desillusionee”

It baffled him that she never appeared much moved, by his charges. Certainly she lived the life of a “fine lady,”–a brilliant life, a luxurious one, a life full of polite dissipation. Once, when in a tenderly fraternal mood, he reproached her with this also, she laughed at him frankly.

“It is absinthe,” she said. “It is my absinthe at least, and who does not drink a little absinthe–of one kind or another?”

He was sincerely convinced that from this moment he understood and had the right to pity and watch over her. He went oftener to see her. In her presence he studied her closely, absent he brooded over her. He became impatiently intolerant of M. Villefort, and prone to condemn him, he scarcely knew for what.

“He has no dignity–no perception,” was his parental decision. “He has not even the delicacy to love her, or he would have the tenderness to sacrifice his own feelings and leave her to herself. I could do it for a woman I loved.”

But M. Villefort was always there,–gravely carrying the shawls, picking up handkerchiefs, and making himself useful.

“Imbecile!” muttered M. Renard under cover of his smile and his mustache, as he stood near his venerable patroness the first time she met the Villeforts.

“Blockhead!” stealthily ejaculated that amiable aristocrat. But though she looked grimly at M. Villefort, M. Renard was uncomfortably uncertain that it was he to whom she referred.

“Go and bring them to me,” she commanded, “Go and bring them to me before some one else engages them. I want to talk to that girl.”

It was astonishing how agreeable she made herself to her victims when she had fairly entrapped them. Bertha hesitated a little before accepting her offer of a seat at her side, but once seated she found herself oddly amused. When Madame de Castro chose to rake the embers of her seventy years, many a lively coal discovered itself among the ashes.

Seeing the two women together, Edmondstone shuddered in fastidious protest.