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 finement to her room; and, at any rate, the Senator must have heard something of the truth, or he would not have been prepared the night before to confound Cora Lestrade’s correct accusation with a generous but entirely erroneous construction of his complicity.

All this made Beaumanoir miserable and ill at ease, the more so that he had three times attempted, without success, to terminate his false position. The two gentlemen had evidently entered into a friendly conspiracy to maintain their own reading of his conduct; and whenever he began to make penitential allusions to it, one or other of them would, so to speak, jump down his throat with an encomium on the motive they chose to attribute to him for originally allying himself to the Lestrade combination. Nor did it add to his comfort on the last of these occasions to catch the Senator deliberately winking at the General.

Now this was exasperating in the present and intolerable for the future, for Beaumanoir had set his heart on that to which, conscience told him, a clear understanding with Senator Sherman was essential. But at last he abandoned direct efforts and sank back in his cor-