The next day passed without a shock.  Ursula sat playing on her piano till very late; and went to bed easier in mind and very sleepy.  About midnight she was awakened by the music of a band composed of a clarinet, hautboy, flute, cornet a piston, trombone, bassoon, flageolet, and triangle.  All the neighbours were at their windows.  The poor girl, already frightened at seeing the people in the street, received a dreadful shock as she heard the coarse, rough voice of a man proclaiming in loud tones:  “For the beautiful Ursula Mirouet, from her lover.”

The next day, Sunday, the whole town had heard of it; and as Ursula entered and left the church she saw the groups of people who stood gossiping about her, and felt herself the object of their terrible curiosity.  The serenade set all tongues wagging, and conjectures were rife on all sides.  Ursula reached home more dead than alive, determined not to leave the house again,—­the abbe having advised her to say vespers in her own room.  As she entered the house she saw lying in the passage, which was floored with brick, a letter which had evidently been slipped under the door.  She picked it up and read it, under the idea that it would obtain an explanation.  It was as follows:—­

“Resign yourself to becoming my wife, rich and idolized.  I am resolved.  If you are not mine living you shall be mine dead.  To your refusal you may attribute not only your own misfortunes, but those which will fall on others.

“He who loves you, and whose wife you will be.”

Curiously enough, at the very moment that the gentle victim of this plot was drooping like a cut flower, Mesdemoiselles Massin, Dionis, and Cremiere were envying her lot.

“She is a lucky girl,” they were saying; “people talk of her, and court her, and quarrel about her.  The serenade was charming; there was a cornet-a-piston.”

“What’s a piston?”

“A new musical instrument, as big as this, see!” replied Angelique Cremiere to Pamela Massin.

Early that morning Savinien had gone to Fontainebleau to endeavor to find out who had engaged the musicians of the regiment then in garrison.  But as there were two men to each instrument it was impossible to find out which of them had gone to Nemours.  The colonel forbade them to play for any private person in future without his permission.  Savinien had an interview with the procureur du roi, Ursula’s legal guardian, and explained to him the injury these scenes would do to a young girl naturally so delicate and sensitive, begging him to take some action to discover the author of such wrong.

Three nights later three violins, a flute, a guitar, and a hautboy began another serenade.  This time the musicians fled towards Montargis, where there happened then to be a company of comic actors.  A loud and ringing voice called out as they left:  “To the daughter of the regimental bandsman Mirouet.”  By this means all Nemours came to know the profession of Ursula’s father, a secret the old doctor had sedulously kept.