A terrible disaster overthrew the old maid from the social heights where she so proudly enthroned herself.

On the very day when the banns were first published, the Baron received a second message from Africa.  Another Alsatian arrived, handed him a letter, after assuring himself that he spoke to Baron Hulot, and after giving the Baron the address of his lodgings, bowed himself out, leaving the great man stricken by the opening lines of this letter:—­

“DEAR NEPHEW,—­You will receive this letter, by my calculations, on the 7th of August.  Supposing it takes you three days to send us the help we need, and that it is a fortnight on the way here, that brings us to the 1st of September.

  “If you can act decisively within that time, you will have saved
  the honor and the life of yours sincerely, Johann Fischer.

“This is what I am required to demand by the clerk you have made my accomplice; for I am amenable, it would seem, to the law, at the Assizes, or before a council of war.  Of course, you understand that Johann Fischer will never be brought to the bar of any tribunal; he will go of his own act to appear at that of God.

“Your clerk seems to me a bad lot, quite capable of getting you into hot water; but he is as clever as any rogue.  He says the line for you to take is to call out louder than any one, and to send out an inspector, a special commissioner, to discover who is really guilty, rake up abuses, and make a fuss, in short; but if we stir up the struggle, who will stand between us and the law?

“If your commissioner arrives here by the 1st of September, and you have given him your orders, sending by him two hundred thousand francs to place in our storehouses the supplies we profess to have secured in remote country places, we shall be absolutely solvent and regarded as blameless.  You can trust the soldier who is the bearer of this letter with a draft in my name on a house in Algiers.  He is a trustworthy fellow, a relation of mine, incapable of trying to find out what he is the bearer of.  I have taken measures to guarantee the fellow’s safe return.  If you can do nothing, I am ready and willing to die for the man to whom we owe our Adeline’s happiness!”

The anguish and raptures of passion and the catastrophe which had checked his career of profligacy had prevented Baron Hulot’s ever thinking of poor Johann Fischer, though his first letter had given warning of the danger now become so pressing.  The Baron went out of the dining-room in such agitation that he literally dropped on to a sofa in the drawing-room.  He was stunned, sunk in the dull numbness of a heavy fall.  He stared at a flower on the carpet, quite unconscious that he still held in his hand Johann’s fatal letter.