Chesnel’s eyes were dim; he could scarcely keep back the tears.  There was but one way of raising the money; he must mortgage his own lands up to their full value.  But when du Croisier learned the difficulty in the way of repayment, he forgot that he was hard pressed; he no longer wanted ready money, and suddenly came out with a proposal to buy the old lawyer’s property.  The sale was completed within two days.  Poor Chesnel could not bear the thought of the son of the house undergoing a five years’ imprisonment for debt.  So in a few days’ time nothing remained to him but his practice, the sums that were due to him, and the house in which he lived.  Chesnel, stripped of all his lands, paced to and fro in his private office, paneled with dark oak, his eyes fixed on the beveled edges of the chestnut cross-beams of the ceiling, or on the trellised vines in the garden outside.  He was not thinking of his farms now, or of Le Jard, his dear house in the country; not he.

“What will become of him?  He ought to come back; they must marry him to some rich heiress,” he said to himself; and his eyes were dim, his head heavy.

How to approach Mlle. Armande, and in what words to break the news to her, he did not know.  The man who had just paid the debts of the family quaked at the thought of confessing these things.  He went from the Rue du Bercail to the Hotel d’Esgrignon with pulses throbbing like some girl’s heart when she leaves her father’s roof by stealth, not to return again till she is a mother and her heart is broken.

Mlle. Armande had just received a charming letter, charming in its hypocrisy.  Her nephew was the happiest man under the sun.  He had been to the baths, he had been traveling in Italy with Mme. de Maufrigneuse, and now sent his journal to his aunt.  Every sentence was instinct with love.  There were enchanting descriptions of Venice, and fascinating appreciations of the great works of Venetian art; there were most wonderful pages full of the Duomo at Milan, and again of Florence; he described the Apennines, and how they differed from the Alps, and how in some village like Chiavari happiness lay all around you, ready made.

The poor aunt was under the spell.  She saw the far-off country of love, she saw, hovering above the land, the angel whose tenderness gave to all that beauty a burning glow.  She was drinking in the letter at long draughts; how should it have been otherwise?  The girl who had put love from her was now a woman ripened by repressed and pent-up passion, by all the longings continually and gladly offered up as a sacrifice on the altar of the hearth.  Mlle. Armande was not like the Duchess.  She did not look like an angel.  She was rather like the little, straight, slim and slender, ivory-tinted statues, which those wonderful sculptors, the builders of cathedrals, placed here and there about the buildings.  Wild plants sometimes find a hold in the damp niches, and weave