d:

"Will you marry me?"

At first he thought he had not understood what she meant. He was stunned
by this wealth.

She repeated in a louder tone:

"Will you marry me?"

At last he said with a smile:

"Have you any doubt about it?"

Then the thought forced itself on his mind that his conduct was
infamous, and in order to make a kind of reparation to the dead man, he
offered to watch by his side himself. But, feeling ashamed of this pious
sentiment, he added, in a flippant tone:

"It would be perhaps more seemly."

"Perhaps so, indeed," she said, "on account of the servants."

The bed had been drawn completely out of the alcove. The nun was near
the foot of it, and at the head of it sat a priest, a different one, a
tall, spare man, with the look of a fanatical Spaniard. On the
night-table, covered with a white cloth, three wax-tapers were burning.

Frederick took a chair, and gazed at the corpse.

The face was as yellow as straw. At the corners of the mouth there were
traces of blood-stained foam. A silk handkerchief was tied around the
skull, and on the breast, covered with a knitted waistcoat, lay a silver
crucifix between the two crossed hands.

It was over, this life full of anxieties! How many journeys had he not
made to various places? How many rows of figures had he not piled
together? How many speculations had he not hatched? How many reports had
he not heard read? What quackeries, what smiles and curvets! For he had
acclaimed Napoleon, the Cossacks, Louis XVIII., 1830, the working-men,
every _regime_, loving power so dearly that he would have paid in order
to have the opportunity of selling himself.

But he had left behind him the estate of La Fortelle, three factories in
Picardy, the woods of Crance in the Yonne, a farm near Orleans, and a
great deal of personal property in the form of bills and papers.

Frederick thus made an estimate of her fortune; and it would soon,
nevertheless, belong to him! First of all, he thought of "what people
would say"; then he asked himself what present he ought to make to his
mother, and he was concerned about his future equipages, and about
employing an old coachman belonging to his own family as the doorkeeper.
Of course, the livery would not be the same. He would convert the large
reception-room into his own study. There was nothing to prevent him by
knocking down three walls from setting up a picture-gallery on the
second-floor. Perhaps there might be an o