“Well, Madame Brouillard, the plain fact is he was—­as you may say—­poor.”

She looked up quickly from her soaking handkerchief, dropped her hands into her lap, and gazing at Camille through her tears said, “Alas!  I feared it.  That is what I feared.  But ah! since it makes no difference to him now, it makes little to me.  I feared it.  That accounts for his leaving it to me, poor milatraise.”

“But would you have imagined, madame, that all he had was barely three thousand dollars?”

“Ah! three thousand—­ah!  Michie Ducour,” she said between a sob and a moan, “that is not so little.  Three thousand!  In Paris, where my brother lives, that would be fifteen thousand francs.  Ah!  Michie Ducour, I never guessed half that much, Michie Ducour, I tell you—­he was too good to be rich.”  Her eyes stood full.

Camille started busily from his leaning posture and they began again to be active.  But, as I have said, their relations were reversed once more.  He gave directions from within the room, and she did short errands to and from the door.

The witnesses came:  first Jean d’Eau, then Richard Reau, and almost at the same moment the aged Ecswyzee.  The black maid led them up from below, and Attalie, tearless now, but meek and red-eyed, and speaking low through the slightly opened door from within the Englishman’s bed-chamber, thanked them, explained that a will was to be made, and was just asking them to find seats in the adjoining front room, when the notary, aged, bent, dark-goggled, and as insensible as a machine, arrived.  Attalie’s offers to explain were murmurously waved away by his wrinkled hand, and the four men followed her into the bedchamber.  The black maid-of-all-work also entered.

The room was heavily darkened.  There was a rich aroma of fine brandy on its air.  The Englishman’s little desk had been drawn up near the bedside.  Two candles were on it, unlighted, in small, old silver candlesticks.  Attalie, grief-worn, distressed, visibly agitated, moved close to the bedside.  Her sad figure suited the place with poetic fitness.  The notary stood by the chair at the desk.  The three witnesses edged along the wall where the curtained windows glimmered, took seats there, and held their hats in their hands.  All looked at one object.

It was a man reclining on the bed under a light covering, deep in pillows, his head and shoulders much bundled up in wrappings.  He moaned faintly and showed every sign of utmost weakness.  His eyes opened only now and then, but when they did so they shone intelligently, though with a restless intensity apparently from both pain and anxiety.

He gasped a faint word.  Attalie hung over him for an instant, and then turning quickly to her maid, who was lighting the candles for the notary and placing them so they should not shine into the eyes of the man in bed, said: 

“His feet—­another hot-water bottle.”