“Ah! she is the joy of the house.  I could not love her better if she were my own daughter.  She will be sixteen on the 5th February.  God grant that I may live long enough to marry her to a man who will make her happy.  I wanted to take her to the theater in Paris, where she was for the first time, but she refused, the Abbe Chaperon had forbidden it.  ‘But,’ I said, ’when you are married your husband will want you to go there.’  ‘I shall do what my husband wants,’ she answered.  ’If he asks me to do evil and I am weak enough to yield, he will be responsible before God—­and so I shall have strength to refuse him, for his own sake.’”

As the coach entered Nemours, at five in the morning, Ursula woke up, ashamed at her rumpled condition, and confused by the look of admiration which she encountered from Savinien.  During the hour it had taken the diligence to come from Bouron to Nemours the young man had fallen in love with Ursula; he had studied the pure candor of her soul, the beauty of that body, the whiteness of the skin, the delicacy of the features; he recalled the charm of the voice which had uttered but one expressive sentence, in which the poor child said all, intending to say nothing.  A presentiment suddenly seemed to take hold of him; he saw in Ursula the woman the doctor had pictured to him, framed in gold by the magic words, “Seven or eight hundred thousand francs.”

“In three of four years she will be twenty, and I shall be twenty-seven,” he thought.  “The good doctor talked of probation, work, good conduct!  Sly as he is I shall make him tell me the truth.”

The three neighbours parted in the street in front of their respective homes, and Savinien put a little courting into his eyes as he gave Ursula a parting glance.

Madame de Portenduere let her son sleep till midday; but the doctor and Ursula, in spite of their fatiguing journey, went to high mass.  Savinien’s release and his return in company with the doctor had explained the reason of the latter’s absence to the newsmongers of the town and to the heirs, who were once more assembled in conventicle on the square, just as they were two weeks earlier when the doctor attended his first mass.  To the great astonishment of all the groups, Madame de Portenduere, on leaving the church, stopped old Minoret, who offered her his arm and took her home.  The old lady asked him to dinner that evening, also asking his niece and assuring him that the abbe would be the only other guest.

“He must have wished Ursula to see Paris,” said Minoret-Levrault.

“Pest!” cried Cremiere; “he can’t take a step without that girl!”

“Something must have happened to make old Portenduere accept his arm,” said Massin.

“So none of you have guessed that your uncle has sold his Funds and released that little Savinien?” cried Goupil.  “He refused Dionis, but he didn’t refuse Madame de Portenduere—­ Ha, ha! you are all done for.  The viscount will propose a marriage-contract instead of a mortgage, and the doctor will make the husband settle on his jewel of a girl the sum he has now paid to secure the alliance.”