all the more plainly because no other expression was there
to interfere with it. Old Minoret, who presently woke up, placed his
child's head in the corner of the carriage that she might be more at
ease; and she let him do it unconsciously, so deep was her sleep after
the many wakeful nights she had spent in thinking of Savinien's trouble.

"Poor little girl!" said the doctor to his neighbour, "she sleeps like
the child she is."

"You must be proud of her," replied Savinien; "for she seems as good as
she is beautiful."

"Ah! she is the joy of the house. I could not love her better if she
were my own daughter. She will be sixteen on the 5th February. God grant
that I may live long enough to marry her to a man who will make her
happy. I wanted to take her to the theater in Paris, where she was for
the first time, but she refused, the Abbe Chaperon had forbidden it.
'But,' I said, 'when you are married your husband will want you to go
there.' 'I shall do what my husband wants,' she answered. 'If he asks me
to do evil and I am weak enough to yield, he will be responsible before
God--and so I shall have strength to refuse him, for his own sake.'"

As the coach entered Nemours, at five in the morning, Ursula woke up,
ashamed at her rumpled condition, and confused by the look of admiration
which she encountered from Savinien. During the hour it had taken the
diligence to come from Bouron to Nemours the young man had fallen in
love with Ursula; he had studied the pure candor of her soul, the beauty
of that body, the whiteness of the skin, the delicacy of the features;
he recalled the charm of the voice which had uttered but one expressive
sentence, in which the poor child said all, intending to say nothing. A
presentiment suddenly seemed to take hold of him; he saw in Ursula the
woman the doctor had pictured to him, framed in gold by the magic words,
"Seven or eight hundred thousand francs."

"In three of four years she will be twenty, and I shall be
twenty-seven," he thought. "The good doctor talked of probation, work,
good conduct! Sly as he is I shall make him tell me the truth."

The three neighbours parted in the street in front of their respective
homes, and Savinien put a little courting into his eyes as he gave
Ursula a parting glance.

Madame de Portenduere let her son sleep till midday; but the doctor
and Ursula, in spite of their fatiguing journey, went to high mass.
Savinien's release and his return in company