His words and manner tortured the heroic girl; she saw the delirium of joy and hope in her father’s face as he looked about him to discover the gold.

“Father,” she said, “I have my own fortune.”

“Give it to me,” he said with a rapacious gesture; “I will return you a hundred-fold.”

“Yes, I will give it to you,” answered Marguerite, looking gravely at Balthazar, who did not know the meaning she put into her words.

“Ah, my dear daughter!” he cried, “you save my life.  I have thought of a last experiment, after which nothing more is possible.  If, this time, I do not find the Absolute, I must renounce the search.  Come to my arms, my darling child; I will make you the happiest woman upon earth.  You give me glory; you bring me back to happiness; you bestow the power to heap treasures upon my children—­yes!  I will load you with jewels, with wealth.”

He kissed his daughter’s forehead, took her hands and pressed them, and testified his joy by fondling caresses which to Marguerite seemed almost obsequious.  During the dinner he thought only of her; he looked at her eagerly with the assiduous devotion displayed by a lover to his mistress:  if she made a movement, he tried to divine her wish, and rose to fulfil it; he made her ashamed by the youthful eagerness of his attentions, which were painfully out of keeping with his premature old age.  To all these cajoleries, Marguerite herself presented the contrast of actual distress, shown sometimes by a word of doubt, sometimes by a glance along the empty shelves of the sideboards in the dining-room.

“Well, well,” he said, following her eyes, “in six months we shall fill them again with gold, and marvellous things.  You shall be like a queen.  Bah! nature herself will belong to us, we shall rise above all created beings—­through you, you my Marguerite!  Margarita,” he said, smiling, “thy name is a prophecy.  ‘Margarita’ means a pearl.  Sterne says so somewhere.  Did you ever read Sterne?  Would you like to have a Sterne? it would amuse you.”

“A pearl, they say, is the result of a disease,” she answered; “we have suffered enough already.”

“Do not be sad; you will make the happiness of those you love; you shall be rich and all-powerful.”

“Mademoiselle has got such a good heart,” said Lemulquinier, whose seamed face stretched itself painfully into a smile.

For the rest of the evening Balthazar displayed to his daughters all the natural graces of his character and the charms of his conversation.  Seductive as the serpent, his lips, his eyes, poured out a magnetic fluid; he put forth that power of genius, that gentleness of spirit, which once fascinated Josephine and now drew, as it were, his daughters into his heart.  When Emmanuel de Solis came he found, for the first time in many months, the father and the children reunited.  The young professor, in spite of his reserve, came under the influence of the scene; for Claes’s manners and conversation had recovered their former irresistible seduction!