ay she was
forty-five. She was a solid little body, rather stouter than was
necessary for beauty; her hair was black, her complexion brown, her eyes
prominent and always moving; lively, active, and if one once yielded to
her whims, exacting beyond measure; but until then buxom and soft, and
inclined to pet and spoil whoever, for the moment, had arrested her
volatile fancy. Just as we make her acquaintance this happy individual
was a certain Maitre Quennebert, a notary of Saint Denis, and the comedy
played between him and the widow was an exact counterpart of the one
going on in the rooms of Mademoiselle de Guerchi, except that the roles
were inverted; for while the lady was as much in love as the Duc de
Vitry, the answering devotion professed by the notary was as insincere as
the disinterested attachment to her lover displayed by the whilom maid of
honour.

Maitre Quennebert was still young and of attractive appearance, but his
business affairs were in a bad way. For long he had been pretending not
to understand the marked advances of the widow, and he treated her with a
reserve and respect she would fain have dispensed with, and which
sometimes made her doubt of his love. But it was impossible for her as a
woman to complain, so she was forced to accept with resignation the
persistent and unwelcome consideration with which he surrounded her.
Maitre Quennebert was a man of common sense and much experience, and had
formed a scheme which he was prevented from carrying out by an obstacle
which he had no power to remove. He wanted, therefore, to gain time, for
he knew that the day he gave the susceptible widow a legal right over him
he would lose his independence. A lover to whose prayers the adored one
remains deaf too long is apt to draw back in discouragement, but a woman
whose part is restricted to awaiting those prayers, and answering with a
yes or no, necessarily learns patience. Maitre Quennebert would
therefore have felt no anxiety as to the effect of his dilatoriness on
the widow, were it not for the existence of a distant cousin of the late
Monsieur Rapally, who was also paying court to her, and that with a
warmth much greater than had hitherto been displayed by himself. This
fact, in view of the state of the notary's affairs, forced him at last to
display more energy. To make up lost ground and to outdistance his rival
once more, he now began to dazzle the widow with fine phrases and delight
her with comp