ccrued interest.

Except during the time required for her household duties, Madame Sauviat
was always seated in a rickety wooden chair placed against the corner
pillar of the building. There she knitted and looked at the passers,
watched over the old iron, sold and weighed it, and received payment
if Sauviat was away making purchases. When at home the husband could be
heard at daybreak pushing open his shutters; the household dog rushed
out into the street; and Madame Sauviat presently came out to help
her man in spreading upon the natural counter made by the low walls
on either side of the corner of the house on the two streets, the
multifarious collection of bells, springs, broken gunlocks, and the
other rubbish of their business, which gave a poverty-stricken look
to the establishment, though it usually contained as much as twenty
thousand francs' worth of lead, steel, iron, and other metals.

Never were the former peddler and his wife known to speak of their
fortune; they concealed its amount as carefully as a criminal hides a
crime; and for years they were suspected of shaving both gold and
silver coins. When Champagnac died the Sauviats made no inventory of his
property; but they rummaged, with the intelligence of rats, into every
nook and corner of the old man's house, left it as naked as a corpse,
and sold the wares it contained in their own shop.

Once a year, in December, Sauviat went to Paris in one of the public
conveyances. The gossips of the neighborhood concluded that in order to
conceal from others the amount of his fortune, he invested it himself on
these occasions. It was known later that, having been connected in his
youth with one of the most celebrated dealers in metal, an Auvergnat
like himself, who was living in Paris, Sauviat placed his funds with
the firm of Bresac, the mainspring and spine of that famous association
known by the name of the "Bande Noire," which, as we have already said,
took its rise from a suggestion made by Sauviat himself.

Sauviat was a fat little man with a weary face, endowed by Nature with
a look of honesty which attracted customers and facilitated the sale of
goods. His straightforward assertions, and the perfect indifference of
his tone and manner, increased this impression. In person, his naturally
ruddy complexion was hardly perceptible under the black metallic dust
which powdered his curly black hair and the seams of a face pitted
with the small-pox. His forehead