ntry
round, never meeting with the slightest disapproval. She kept one
woman-servant and the page. Her yearly expenses, not including taxes,
did not amount to over a thousand francs. Consequently, she was the
object of the cajoleries of the Kergarouet-Pen-Hoels, who passed the
winters at Nantes, and the summers at their estate on the banks of the
Loire below l'Indret. She was supposed to be ready to leave her fortune
and her savings to whichever of her nieces pleased her best. Every three
months one or other of the four demoiselles de Kergarouet-Pen-Hoel, (the
youngest of whom was twelve, and the eldest twenty years of age) came to
spend a few days with her.

A friend of Zephirine du Guenic, Jacqueline de Pen-Hoel, brought up to
adore the Breton grandeur of the du Guenics, had formed, ever since the
birth of Calyste, the plan of transmitting her property to the
chevalier by marrying him to whichever of her nieces the Vicomtesse de
Kergarouet-Pen-Hoel, their mother, would bestow upon him. She dreamed
of buying back some of the best of the Guenic property from the farmer
_engagistes_. When avarice has an object it ceases to be a vice; it
becomes a means of virtue; its privations are a perpetual offering;
it has the grandeur of an intention beneath its meannesses. Perhaps
Zephirine was in the secret of Jacqueline's intention. Perhaps even
the baroness, whose whole soul was occupied by love for her son and
tenderness for his father, may have guessed it as she saw with what
wily perseverance Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoel brought with her her favorite
niece, Charlotte de Kergarouet, now sixteen years of age. The rector,
Monsieur Grimont, was certainly in her confidence; it was he who helped
the old maid to invest her savings.

But Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoel might have had three hundred thousand
francs in gold, she might have had ten times the landed property
she actually possessed, and the du Guenics would never have allowed
themselves to pay her the slightest attention that the old woman could
construe as looking to her fortune. From a feeling of truly Breton
pride, Jacqueline de Pen-Hoel, glad of the supremacy accorded to her old
friend Zephirine and the du Guenics, always showed herself honored by
her relations with Madame du Guenic and her sister-in-law. She even went
so far as to conceal the sort of sacrifice to which she consented every
evening in allowing her page to burn in the Guenic hall that singular
gingerbread-colored