“My dear!” she said, forgetting everything in her excessive joy, “you can come home to us all; we are rich.  Your son draws a hundred and sixty thousand francs a year!  Your pension is released; there are fifteen thousand francs of arrears you can get on showing that you are alive.  Valerie is dead, and left you three hundred thousand francs.

“Your name is quite forgotten by this time; you may reappear in the world, and you will find a fortune awaiting you at your son’s house.  Come; our happiness will be complete.  For nearly three years I have been seeking you, and I felt so sure of finding you that a room is ready waiting for you.  Oh! come away from this, come away from the dreadful state I see you in!”

“I am very willing,” said the bewildered Baron, “but can I take the girl?”

“Hector, give her up!  Do that much for your Adeline, who has never before asked you to make the smallest sacrifice.  I promise you I will give the child a marriage portion; I will see that she marries well, and has some education.  Let it be said of one of the women who have given you happiness that she too is happy; and do not relapse into vice, into the mire.”

“So it was you,” said the Baron, with a smile, “who wanted to see me married?—­Wait a few minutes,” he added; “I will go upstairs and dress; I have some decent clothes in a trunk.”

Adeline, left alone, and looking round the squalid shop, melted into tears.

“He has been living here, and we rolling in wealth!” said she to herself.  “Poor man, he has indeed been punished—­he who was elegance itself.”

The stove-fitter returned to make his bow to his benefactress, and she desired him to fetch a coach.  When he came back, she begged him to give little Atala Judici a home, and to take her away at once.

“And tell her that if she will place herself under the guidance of Monsieur the Cure of the Madeleine, on the day when she attends her first Communion I will give her thirty thousand francs and find her a good husband, some worthy young man.”

“My eldest son, then madame!  He is two-and-twenty, and he worships the child.”

The Baron now came down; there were tears in his eyes.

“You are forcing me to desert the only creature who had ever begun to love me at all as you do!” said he in a whisper to his wife.  “She is crying bitterly, and I cannot abandon her so—­”

“Be quite easy, Hector.  She will find a home with honest people, and I will answer for her conduct.”

“Well, then, I can go with you,” said the Baron, escorting his wife to the cab.

Hector, the Baron d’Ervy once more, had put on a blue coat and trousers, a white waistcoat, a black stock, and gloves.  When the Baroness had taken her seat in the vehicle, Atala slipped in like an eel.

“Oh, madame,” she said, “let me go with you.  I will be so good, so obedient; I will do whatever you wish; but do not part me from my Daddy Vyder, my kind Daddy who gives me such nice things.  I shall be beaten—­”