.

A SORDID MATTER.
"Bon Dieu! my old friend, what do you expect ?" replied Madame de Chantonnay to a rather incoherent statement made to her one May afternoon by the Marquis de Gemosac.

"It is the month of May," she further explained, indicating with a gesture of her dimpled hand the roses abloom all around them.

For the Marquis had found her in a chair beneath the mulberry-tree in the old garden of that house near Gemosac which looks across the river toward the sea.

"It is the month of May.
One is young.