red, hung on chances
as uncertain as those in a game of roulette? What nonsense! The failure
of a great financial company had brought about a crisis on the Bourse.
The news of the inability of Wermant, the 'agent de change', to meet
his engagements, had completed the downfall of M. de Nailles. Not only
death, but ruin, had entered that house, where, a few hours before,
luxury and opulence had seemed to reign.

"We don't know whether there will be anything left for us to live upon,"
cried Madame de Nailles, with anguish, even while her husband's body
lay in the chamber of death, and Jacqueline, kneeling beside it, wept,
unwilling to receive comfort or consolation.

She turned angrily upon her stepmother and cried:

"What matter? I have no father--there is nothing else I care for."

But from that moment a dreadful thought, a thought she was ashamed of,
which made her feel a monster of selfishness, rose in her mind, do
what she would to hinder it. Jacqueline was sensible that she cared
for something else; great as was her sense of loss, a sort of reckless
curiosity seemed haunting her, while all the time she felt that her
great grief ought not to give place to anything besides. "How would
Gerard de Cymier behave in these circumstances?" She thought about it
all one dreadful night as she and Modeste, who was telling her beads
softly, sat in the faint light of the death-chamber. She thought of it
at dawn, when, after one of those brief sleeps which come to the young
under all conditions, she resumed with a sigh a sense of surrounding
realities. Almost in the same instant she thought: "My dear father will
never wake again," and "Does he love me?--does he now wish me to be his
wife?--will he take me away?" The devil, which put this thought into
her heart, made her eager to know the answer to these questions. He
suggested how dreadful life with her stepmother would be if no means of
escape were offered her. He made her foresee that her stepmother would
marry again--would marry Marien. "But I shall not be there!" she cried,
"I will not countenance such an infamy!" Oh, how she hoped Gerard de
Cymier loved her! The hypocritical tears of Madame de Nailles disgusted
her. She could not bear to have such false grief associated with her
own.

Men in black, with solemn faces, came and bore away the body, no longer
like the form of the father she had loved. He had gone from her forever.
Pompous funeral rites, little in accordance wi