At this moment Modeste, happy as she was in the return of her father, was, nevertheless, pacing her room disconsolate as Perrette on seeing her eggs broken.  She had hoped her father would bring back a much larger fortune than Dumay had mentioned.  Nothing could satisfy her new-found ambition on behalf of her poet less than at least half the six millions she had talked of in her second letter.  Trebly agitated by her two joys and the grief caused by her comparative poverty, she seated herself at the piano, that confidant of so many young girls, who tell out their wishes and provocations on the keys, expressing them by the notes and tones of their music.  Dumay was talking with his wife in the garden under the windows, telling her the secret of their own wealth, and questioning her as to her desires and her intentions.  Madame Dumay had, like her husband, no other family than the Mignons.  Husband and wife agreed, therefore, to go and live in Provence, if the Comte de La Bastie really meant to live in Provence, and to leave their money to whichever of Modeste’s children might need it most.

“Listen to Modeste,” said Madame Mignon, addressing them.  “None but a girl in love can compose such airs without having studied music.”

Houses may burn, fortunes be engulfed, fathers return from distant lands, empires may crumble away, the cholera may ravage cities, but a maiden’s love wings its way as nature pursues hers, or that alarming acid which chemistry has lately discovered, and which will presently eat through the globe, if nothing stops it.

Modeste, under the inspiration of her present situation, was putting to music certain stanzas which we are compelled to quote here—­albeit they are printed in the second volume of the edition Dauriat had mentioned—­because, in order to adapt them to her music, which had the inexpressible charm of sentiment so admired in great singers, Modeste had taken liberties with the lines in a manner that may astonish the admirers of a poet so famous for the correctness, sometimes too precise, of his measures.

  The maiden’s song

  Hear, arise! the lark is shaking
    Sunlit wings that heavenward rise;
  Sleep no more; the violet, waking,
    Wafts her incense to the skies.

  Flowers revived, their eyes unclosing,
    See themselves in drops of dew
  In each calyx-cup reposing,
    Pearls of a day their mirror true.

  Breeze divine, the god of roses,
    Passed by night to bless their bloom;
  See! for him each bud uncloses,
    Glows, and yields its rich perfume.

  Then arise! the lark is shaking
    Sunlit wings that heavenward rise;
  Nought is sleeping—­Heart, awaking,
    Lift thine incense to the skies.

“It is very pretty,” said Madame Dumay.  “Modeste is a musician, and that’s the whole of it.”

“The devil is in her!” cried the cashier, into whose heart the suspicion of the mother forced its way and made him shiver.