y of the pomps of marriage and of wedding fetes; a scene
like this is very bare and sad. If I may say what I think," she added,
in a whisper to her neighbor, "this marriage seems to me indecent."

Madame Evangelista took Natalie in her carriage and accompanied her,
alone, to Paul's house.

"Well, mother, it is done!"

"Remember, my dear child, my last advice, and you will be a happy woman.
Be his wife, and not his mistress."

When Natalie had retired, the mother played the little comedy of
flinging herself with tears into the arms of her son-in-law. It was the
only provincial thing that Madame Evangelista allowed herself, but she
had her reasons for it. Amid tears and speeches, apparently half
wild and despairing, she obtained of Paul those concessions which all
husbands make.

The next day she put the married pair into their carriage, and
accompanied them to the ferry, by which the road to Paris crosses the
Gironde. With a look and a word Natalie enabled her mother to see that
if Paul had won the trick in the game of the contract, her revenge
was beginning. Natalie was already reducing her husband to perfect
obedience.

CHAPTER VI. CONCLUSION

Five years later, on an afternoon in the month of November, Comte Paul
de Manerville, wrapped in a cloak, was entering, with a bowed head and
a mysterious manner, the house of his old friend Monsieur Mathias at
Bordeaux.

Too old to continue in business, the worthy notary had sold his practice
and was ending his days peacefully in a quiet house to which he had
retired. An urgent affair had obliged him to be absent at the moment of
his guest's arrival, but his housekeeper, warned of Paul's coming, took
him to the room of the late Madame Mathias, who had been dead a year.
Fatigued by a rapid journey, Paul slept till evening. When the old man
reached home he went up to his client's room, and watched him sleeping,
as a mother watches her child. Josette, the old housekeeper, followed
her master and stood before the bed, her hands on her hips.

"It is a year to-day, Josette, since I received my dear wife's last
sigh; I little knew then that I should stand here again to see the count
half dead."

"Poor man! he moans in his sleep," said Josette.

"Sac a papier!" cried the old notary, an innocent oath which was a
sign with him of the despair on a man of business before insurmountable
difficulties. "At any rate," he thought, "I have saved the title to the
Lanstrac es