“Louis,” continued Rose, dropping her voice to a whisper, after nothing more was audible, “when may I trust our secret to my husband?”

“Not yet!” rejoined Trudaine, earnestly.  “Not a word, not a hint of it, till I give you leave.  Remember, Rose, you promised silence from the first.  Everything depends on your holding that promise sacred till I release you from it.”

“I will hold it sacred; I will indeed, at all hazards, under all provocations,” she answered.

“That is quite enough to reassure me—­and now, love, let us change the subject.  Even these walls may have ears, and the closed door yonder may be no protection.”  He looked toward it uneasily while he spoke.  “By-the-by, I have come round to your way of thinking, Rose, about that new servant of mine—­there is something false in his face.  I wish I had been as quick to detect it as you were.”

Rose glanced at him affrightedly.  “Has he done anything suspicious?  Have you caught him watching you?  Tell me the worst, Louis.”

“Hush! hush! my dear, not so loud.  Don’t alarm yourself; he has done nothing suspicious.”

“Turn him off—­pray, pray turn him off, before it is too late!”

“And be denounced by him, in revenge, the first night he goes to his Section.  You forget that servants and masters are equal now.  I am not supposed to keep a servant at all.  I have a citizen living with me who lays me under domestic obligations, for which I make a pecuniary acknowledgment.  No! no! if I do anything, I must try if I can’t entrap him into giving me warning.  But we have got to another unpleasant subject already—­suppose I change the topic again?  You will find a little book on that table there, in the corner—­tell me what you think of it.”

The book was a copy of Corneille’s “Cid,” prettily bound in blue morocco.  Rose was enthusiastic in her praises.  “I found it in a bookseller’s shop, yesterday,” said her brother, “and bought it as a present for you.  Corneille is not an author to compromise any one, even in these times.  Don’t you remember saying the other day that you felt ashamed of knowing but little of our greatest dramatist?” Rose remembered well, and smiled almost as happily as in the old times over her present.  “There are some good engravings at the beginning of each act,” continued Trudaine, directing her attention rather earnestly to the illustrations, and then suddenly leaving her side when he saw that she became interested in looking at them.

He went to the window—­listened—­then drew aside the curtain, and looked up and down the street.  No living soul was in sight.  “I must have been mistaken,” he thought, returning hastily to his sister; “but I certainly fancied I was followed in my walk to-day by a spy.”

“I wonder,” asked Rose, still busy over her book, “I wonder, Louis, whether my husband would let me go with you to see ’Le Cid’ the next time it is acted.”