owing more and more melancholy.

"Her name is Catherine, like your dead wife's."

"Catherine? Yes, I shall be glad to have to pronounce that name,
Catherine; and yet if I cannot love one as much as the other, it will
pain me all the more. It will bring her to my mind more often."

"I tell you, you will love her. She is a good soul, a woman with a warm
heart. I have not seen her for a long time. She was not an ugly girl
then. But she is no longer young. She is thirty-two. She comes of a good
family, honest people all of them, and for property she has eight or ten
thousand francs in land which she would sell gladly in order to invest
in the place where she settles. For she, too, is thinking of marrying
again, and I know that if your character pleases her, she will not be
dissatisfied with your situation."

"So you have made all the arrangements?"

"Yes, except that I have not had an opinion from either of you, and that
is what you must ask each other when you meet. The woman's father is
a distant connection of mine, and he has been a good friend to me. You
know Father Leonard well?"

"Yes, I have seen you two talking at the market, and at the last you
lunched together. Then it was about her that he spoke to you so long?"

"Certainly. He watched you selling your cattle and saw that you drove
a shrewd bargain, and that you were a good-looking fellow and appeared
active and intelligent; and when I told him what a good fellow you were
and how well you have behaved toward us, without one word of vexation or
anger during the eight years we have been living and working together,
he took it into his head to marry you to his daughter. This suits me,
too, I admit, when I think of her good reputation and the honesty of her
family and the prosperous condition I know her affairs are in."

"I see, Father Maurice, that you have an eye to money."

"Of course I do; you have, too, have you not?"

"I do look toward it, if you wish, for your sake; but you know that,
for my own part, I don't worry whether I gain or not in what we make. I
don't understand about profit-sharing; I have no head for that sort
of thing. I understand the ground; I understand cattle, horses, carts,
sowing, threshing, and provender. As for sheep, and vineyards, and
vegetables, petty profits, and fine gardening, you know that is your
son's business. I don't have much to do with it. As to money, my memory
is short, and I should rather give up everything than f