n rapidity
or strength. Before long the rich bourgeois, who still met in Dionis's
salon, noticed a great change in the manners and behavior of the man who
had hitherto been so free of care.

"I don't know what has come to Minoret, he is all _no how_," said his
wife, from whom he was resolved to hide his daring deed.

Everybody explained his condition as being, neither more nor less, ennui
(in fact the thought now expressed on his face did resemble ennui),
caused, they said, by the sudden cessation of business and the change
from an active life to one of well-to-do leisure.

While Minoret was thinking only of destroying Ursula's life in Nemours,
La Bougival never let a day go by without torturing her foster child
with some allusion to the fortune she ought to have had, or without
comparing her miserable lot with the prospects the doctor had promised,
and of which he had often spoken to her, La Bougival.

"It is not for myself I speak," she said, "but is it likely that
monsieur, good and kind as he was, would have died without leaving me
the merest trifle?--"

"Am I not here?" replied Ursula, forbidding La Bougival to say another
word on the subject.

She could not endure to soil the dear and tender memories that
surrounded that noble head--a sketch of which in black and white hung
in her little salon--with thoughts of selfish interest. To her fresh
and beautiful imagination that sketch sufficed to make her _see_ her
godfather, on whom her thoughts continually dwelt, all the more because
surrounded with the things he loved and used,--his large duchess-sofa,
the furniture from his study, his backgammon-table, and the piano he had
chosen for her. The two old friends who still remained to her, the Abbe
Chaperon and Monsieur Bongrand, the only visitors whom she received,
were, in the midst of these inanimate objects representative of the
past, like two living memories of her former life to which she attached
her present by the love her godfather had blessed.

After a while the sadness of her thoughts, softening gradually, gave
tone to the general tenor of her life and united all its parts in an
indefinable harmony, expressed by the exquisite neatness, the exact
symmetry of her room, the few flowers sent by Savinien, the dainty
nothings of a young girl's life, the tranquillity which her quiet habits
diffused about her, giving peace and composure to the little home. After
breakfast and after mass she continued her studi