funeral observances the bereaved family—­mother, daughters, sons and sons-in-law—­came down to seclude themselves at Saint Desert; and Undine, through the slow hot crape-smelling months, lived encircled by shrouded images of woe in which the only live points were the eyes constantly fixed on her least movements.  The hope of escaping to the seaside with Paul vanished in the pained stare with which her mother-in-law received the suggestion.  Undine learned the next day that it had cost the old Marquise a sleepless night, and might have had more distressing results had it not been explained as a harmless instance of transatlantic oddness.  Raymond entreated his wife to atone for her involuntary legerete by submitting with a good grace to the usages of her adopted country; and he seemed to regard the remaining months of the summer as hardly long enough for this act of expiation.  As Undine looked back on them, they appeared to have been composed of an interminable succession of identical days, in which attendance at early mass (in the coroneted gallery she had once so glowingly depicted to Van Degen) was followed by a great deal of conversational sitting about, a great deal of excellent eating, an occasional drive to the nearest town behind a pair of heavy draft horses, and long evenings in a lamp-heated drawing-room with all the windows shut, and the stout cure making an asthmatic fourth at the Marquise’s card-table.

Still, even these conditions were not permanent, and the discipline of the last years had trained Undine to wait and dissemble.  The summer over, it was decided—­after a protracted family conclave—­that the state of the old Marquise’s health made it advisable for her to spend the winter with the married daughter who lived near Pau.  The other members of the family returned to their respective estates, and Undine once more found herself alone with her husband.  But she knew by this time that there was to be no thought of Paris that winter, or even the next spring.  Worse still, she was presently to discover that Raymond’s accession of rank brought with it no financial advantages.

Having but the vaguest notion of French testamentary law, she was dismayed to learn that the compulsory division of property made it impossible for a father to benefit his eldest son at the expense of the others.  Raymond was therefore little richer than before, and with the debts of honour of a troublesome younger brother to settle, and Saint Desert to keep up, his available income was actually reduced.  He held out, indeed, the hope of eventual improvement, since the old Marquis had managed his estates with a lofty contempt for modern methods, and the application of new principles of agriculture and forestry were certain to yield profitable results.  But for a year or two, at any rate, this very change of treatment would necessitate the owner’s continual supervision, and would not in the meanwhile produce any increase of income.