lone had
the patience to each me the decimal calculus. Oh! he was a good priest!
He was economical and laid by money. It is four years since he died; I
don't know what was the matter with him; perhaps it was that priests are
so in the habit of kneeling down to pray that he couldn't get accustomed
to standing upright here as I do. I walled him up there; _they'd_ have
dug him up elsewhere. Some day perhaps I can put him in holy ground, as
he used to call it,--poor man, he only took the oath out of fear."

A tear rolled from the hard eyes of the little old man, whose rusty
wig suddenly seemed less hideous to the girl, and she turned her eyes
respectfully away from his distress. But, in spite of these tender
reminiscences, d'Orgemont kept on saying, "Don't go near the wall, you
might--"

His eyes never ceased to watch hers, hoping thus to prevent her from
examining too closely the walls of the closet, where the close air
was scarcely enough to inflate the lungs. Marie succeeded, however, in
getting a sufficiently good look in spite of her Argus, and she came to
the conclusion that the strange protuberances in the walls were neither
more nor less than sacks of coin which the miser had placed there and
plastered up.

Old d'Orgemont was now in a state of almost grotesque bewilderment.
The pain in his legs, the terror he felt at seeing a human being in the
midst of his hoards, could be read in every wrinkle of his face, and yet
at the same time his eyes expressed, with unaccustomed fire, a lively
emotion excited in him by the presence of his liberator, whose white
and rosy cheek invited kisses, and whose velvety black eye sent waves of
blood to his heart, so hot that he was much in doubt whether they were
signs of life or of death.

"Are you married?" he asked, in a trembling voice.

"No," she said, smiling.

"I have a little something," he continued, heaving a sigh, "though I
am not so rich as people think for. A young girl like you must love
diamonds, trinkets, carriages, money. I've got all that to give--after
my death. Hey! if you will--"

The old man's eyes were so shrewd and betrayed such calculation in this
ephemeral love that Mademoiselle de Verneuil, as she shook her head in
sign of refusal, felt that his desire to marry her was solely to bury
his secret in another himself.

"Money!" she said, with a look of scorn which made him satisfied and
angry both; "money is nothing to me. You would be three times as ri