The walls of Nemours were cleared of the inscription; but the quarrel between Minoret and his wife went on; and Savinien maintained a threatening silence.  Ten days after these events the marriage of Mademoiselle Massin, the elder, to the future notary was bruited about the town.  Mademoiselle Massin had a dowry of eighty thousand francs and her own peculiar ugliness; Goupil had his deformities and his practice; the union therefore seemed suitable and probable.  One evening, towards midnight, two unknown men seized Goupil in the street as he was leaving Massin’s house, gave him a sound beating, and disappeared.  The notary kept the matter a profound secret, and even contradicted an old woman who saw the scene from her window and thought that she recognized him.

These great little events were carefully studied by Bongrand, who became convinced that Goupil held some mysterious power over Minoret, and he determined to find out its cause.

CHAPTER XIX

APPARITIONS

Though the public opinion of the little town recognized Ursula’s perfect innocence, she recovered slowly.  While in a state of bodily exhaustion, which left her mind and spirit free, she became the medium of phenomena the effects of which were astounding, and of a nature to challenge science, if science had been brought into contact with them.

Ten days after Madame de Portenduere’s visit Ursula had a dream, with all the characteristics of a supernatural vision, as much in its moral aspects as in the, so to speak, physical circumstances.  Her godfather appeared to her and made a sign that she should come with him.  She dressed herself and followed him through the darkness to their former house in the Rue des Bourgeois, where she found everything precisely as it was on the day of her godfather’s death.  The old man wore the clothes that were on him the evening before his death.  His face was pale, his movements caused no sound; nevertheless, Ursula heard his voice distinctly, though it was feeble and as if repeated by a distant echo.  The doctor conducted his child as far as the Chinese pagoda, where he made her lift the marble top of the little Boule cabinet just as she had raised it on the day of his death; but instead of finding nothing there she saw the letter her godfather had told her to fetch.  She opened it and read both the letter addressed to herself and the will in favor of Savinien.  The writing, as she afterwards told the abbe, shone as if traced by sunbeams—­“it burned my eyes,” she said.  When she looked at her uncle to thank him she saw the old benevolent smile upon his discolored lips.  Then, in a feeble voice, but still clearly, he told her to look at Minoret, who was listening in the corridor to what he said to her; and next, slipping the lock of the library door with his knife, and taking the papers from the study.  With his right hand the old man seized his goddaughter and obliged her to walk at the pace of death and follow Minoret to his own house.  Ursula crossed the town, entered the post house and went into Zelie’s old room, where the spectre showed her Minoret unfolding the letters, reading them and burning them.