general.

"Yes, but what became of your cuirassiers?" asked Blondet.

"Such a fine estate!"

"It will sell to-day for over two millions."

"The chateau alone must have cost that," remarked Monsieur de
Troisville.

"One of the best properties in a circumference of sixty miles," said the
sub-prefect; "but you can find a better near Paris."

"How much income does one get from two millions?" asked the countess.

"Now-a-days, about eighty thousand francs," replied Blondet.

"Les Aigues does not bring in, all told, more than thirty thousand,"
said the countess; "and lately you have been at such immense
expenses,--you have surrounded the woods this year with ditches."

"You could get," added Blondet, "a royal chateau for four hundred
thousand francs near Paris. In these days people buy the follies of
others."

"I thought you cared for Les Aigues!" said the count to his wife.

"Don't you feel that I care a thousand times more for your life?" she
replied. "Besides, ever since the death of my poor Olympe and Michaud's
murder the country is odious to me; all the faces I meet seem to wear a
treacherous or threatening expression."

The next evening the sub-prefect, having ended his visit at the chateau,
was welcomed in the salon of Monsieur Gaubertin at Ville-aux-Fayes in
these words:--

"Well, Monsieur des Lupeaulx, so you have returned from Les Aigues?"

"Yes," answered the sub-prefect with a little air of triumph and a look
of tender regard at Mademoiselle Elise, "and I am very much afraid to
say we may lose the general; he talks of selling his property--"

"Monsieur Gaubertin, I speak for my pavilion. I can on longer endure the
noise, the dust of Ville-aux-Fayes; like a poor imprisoned bird I gasp
for the air of the fields, the woodland breezes," said Madame Isaure, in
a lackadaisical voice, with her eyes half-closed and her head bending
to her left shoulder as she played carelessly with the long curls of her
blond hair.

"Pray be prudent, madame!" said her husband in a low voice; "your
indiscretions will not help me to buy the pavilion." Then, turning to
the sub-prefect, he added, "Haven't they yet discovered the men who were
concerned in the murder of the bailiff?"

"It seems not," replied the sub-prefect.

"That will injure the sale of Les Aigues," said Gaubertin to the
company generally, "I know very well that I would not buy the place. The
peasantry over there are such a bad set of people; even in the