Mathieu was looking at her, surprised to see that she did not age.  The fiery flame of her wild life seemed to scorch and preserve her.  He knew that her home was now completely wrecked.  Seguin openly lived with Nora, the governess, for whom he had furnished a little house.  It was there even that he had given Mathieu an appointment to sign the final transfer of the Chantebled property.  And since Gaston had entered the military college of St. Cyr, Valentine had only her two daughters with her in the spacious, luxurious mansion of the Avenue d’Antin, which ruin was slowly destroying.

“I think,” resumed Madame Seguin, “that I shall tell Gaston to obtain permission to attend the funeral.  For I am not sure whether his father is in Paris.  It’s just the same with our friend Santerre; he’s starting on a tour to-morrow.  Ah! not only do the dead leave us, but it is astonishing what a number of the living go off and disappear!  Life is very sad, is it not, dear madame?”

As she spoke a little quiver passed over her face; the dread of the coming rupture, which she had felt approaching for several months past, amid all the skilful preparations of Santerre, who had been long maturing some secret plan, which she did not as yet divine.  However, she made a devout ecstatic gesture, and added:  “Well, we are in the hands of God.”

Marianne, who was still smiling at the ever-motionless girls in the closed brougham, changed the subject.  “How tall they have grown, how pretty they have become!  Your Andree looks adorable.  How old is your Lucie now?  She will soon be of an age to marry.”

“Oh! don’t let her hear you,” retorted Valentine; “you would make her burst into tears!  She is seventeen, but for sense she isn’t twelve.  Would you believe it, she began sobbing this morning and refusing to go to the wedding, under the pretence that it would make her ill?  She is always talking of convents; we shall have to come to a decision about her.  Andree, though she is only thirteen, is already much more womanly.  But she is a little stupid, just like a sheep.  Her gentleness quite upsets me at times; it jars on my nerves.”

Then Valentine, on the point of getting into her carriage, turned to shake hands with Marianne, and thought of inquiring after her health.  “Really,” said she, “I lose my head at times.  I was quite forgetting.  And the baby you’re expecting will be your eleventh child, will it now?  How terrible!  Still it succeeds with you.  And, ah! those poor people whom you are going to see, their house will be quite empty now.”

When the brougham had rolled away it occurred to Mathieu and Marianne that before seeing the Beauchenes it might be advisable for them to call at the little pavilion, where their son or their daughter-in-law might be able to give them some useful information.  But neither Blaise nor Charlotte was there.  They found only a servant who was watching over the little girl, Berthe.  This servant declared that she had