“No,” said Josephine, “no; I love no one.  I never shall love any one again.”

“But him.  It is that love which turns your heart against others.  Oh, yes, you love him, dearest, or why should you fancy our secret benefactor could be that Camille?”

“Why?  Because I was mad:  because it is impossible; but I see my folly.  I am going in.”

“What! don’t you care to know who I think it was, perhaps?”

“No,” said Josephine sadly and doggedly; she added with cold nonchalance, “I dare say time will show.”  And she went slowly in, her hand to her head.

“Her birthday!” sighed Rose.

The donor, whoever he was, little knew the pain he was inflicting on this distressed but proud family, or the hard battle that ensued between their necessities and their delicacy.  The ten gold pieces were a perpetual temptation:  a daily conflict.  The words that accompanied the donation offered a bait.  Their pride and dignity declined it; but these bright bits of gold cost them many a sharp pang.  You must know that Josephine and Rose had worn out their mourning by this time; and were obliged to have recourse to gayer materials that lay in their great wardrobes, and were older, but less worn.  A few of these gold pieces would have enabled the poor girls to be neat, and yet to mourn their father openly.  And it went through and through those tender, simple hearts, to think that they must be disunited, even in so small a thing as dress; that while their mother remained in her weeds, they must seem no longer to share her woe.

The baroness knew their feeling, and felt its piety, and yet could not bow her dignity to say, “Take five of these bits of gold, and let us all look what we are—­one.”  Yet in this, as in everything else, they supported each other.  They resisted, they struggled, and with a wrench they conquered day by day.  At last, by general consent, Josephine locked up the tempter, and they looked at it no more.  But the little bit of paper met a kinder fate.  Rose made a little frame for it, and it was kept in a drawer, in the salon:  and often looked at and blessed.  Just when they despaired of human friendship, this paper with the sacred word “friend” written on it, had fallen all in a moment on their aching hearts.

They could not tell whence it came, this blessed word.

But men dispute whence comes the dew?

Then let us go with the poets, who say it comes from heaven.

And even so that sweet word, friend, dropped like the dew from heaven on these afflicted ones.

So they locked the potent gold away from themselves, and took the kind slip of paper to their hearts.

The others left off guessing:  Aubertin had it all his own way:  he upheld Perrin as their silent benefactor, and bade them all observe that the worthy notary had never visited the chateau openly since the day the purse was left there.  “Guilty conscience,” said Aubertin dryly.