o people that have no heart in them--'"

"No heart in them, that is just it," repeated Pons. And with that he
began to tell Mme. Cibot about his troubles and mortifications, she
pouring out abuse of the relations the while and showing exceeding
tenderness on every fresh sentence in the sad history. She fairly wept
at last.

To understand the sudden intimacy between the old musician and Mme.
Cibot, you have only to imagine the position of an old bachelor lying on
his bed of pain, seriously ill for the first time in his life. Pons felt
that he was alone in the world; the days that he spent by himself were
all the longer because he was struggling with the indefinable nausea of
a liver complaint which blackens the brightest life. Cut off from all
his many interests, the sufferer falls a victim to a kind of nostalgia;
he regrets the many sights to be seen for nothing in Paris. The
isolation, the darkened days, the suffering that affects the mind and
spirits even more than the body, the emptiness of the life,--all these
things tend to induce him to cling to the human being who waits on him
as a drowned man clings to a plank; and this especially if the
bachelor patient's character is as weak as his nature is sensitive and
incredulous.

Pons was charmed to hear La Cibot's tittle-tattle. Schmucke, Mme. Cibot,
and Dr. Poulain meant all humanity to him now, when his sickroom became
the universe. If invalid's thoughts, as a rule, never travel beyond in
the little space over which his eyes can wander; if their selfishness,
in its narrow sphere, subordinates all creatures and all things to
itself, you can imagine the lengths to which an old bachelor may go.
Before three weeks were out he had even gone so far as to regret, once
and again, that he had not married Madeleine Vivet! Mme. Cibot, too, had
made immense progress in his esteem in those three weeks; without her
he felt that he should have been utterly lost; for as for Schmucke, the
poor invalid looked upon him as a second Pons. La Cibot's prodigious
art consisted in expressing Pons' own ideas, and this she did quite
unconsciously.

"Ah! here comes the doctor!" she exclaimed, as the bell rang, and away
she went, knowing very well that Remonencq had come with the Jew.

"Make no noise, gentlemen," said she, "he must not know anything. He is
all on the fidget when his precious treasures are concerned."

"A walk round will be enough," said the Hebrew, armed with a
magnifying-