It was a cold morning and the roads were dry and hard.  The north wind blew freely across the arid fields and the river, and swept unopposed through the leafless trees and bushes.  The chateau appeared under the low-hanging clouds, with its long line of low walls and hedges separating it from the surrounding fields.  The slates on the roof were as dark as the sky they reflected; and that magnificent summer residence, completely transformed by the bitter, silent winter, without a leaf on its trees or a pigeon on its roofs, showed no life save in its rippling brooks and the murmuring of the tall poplars as they bowed majestically to one another, shaking the magpies’ nests hidden among their highest branches.

At a distance Claire fancied that the home of her youth wore a surly, depressed air.  It seemed to het that Savigny watched her approach with the cold, aristocratic expression which it assumed for passengers on the highroad, who stopped at the iron bars of its gateways.

Oh! the cruel aspect of everything!

And yet not so cruel after all.  For, with its tightly closed exterior, Savigny seemed to say to her, “Begone—­do not come in!” And if she had chosen to listen, Claire, renouncing her plan of speaking to her grandfather, would have returned at once to Paris to maintain the repose of her life.  But she did not understand, poor child! and already the great Newfoundland dog, who had recognized her, came leaping through the dead leaves and sniffed at the gate.

“Good-morning, Francoise.  Where is grandpapa?” the young woman asked the gardener’s wife, who came to open the gate, fawning and false and trembling, like all the servants at the chateau when they felt that the master’s eye was upon them.

Grandpapa was in his office, a little building independent of the main house, where he passed his days fumbling among boxes and pigeonholes and great books with green backs, with the rage for bureaucracy due to his early ignorance and the strong impression made upon him long before by the office of the notary in his village.

At that moment he was closeted there with his keeper, a sort of country spy, a paid informer who apprised him as to all that was said and done in the neighborhood.

He was the master’s favorite.  His name was Fouinat (polecat), and he had the flat, crafty, blood-thirsty face appropriate to his name.

When Claire entered, pale and trembling under her furs, the old man understood that something serious and unusual had happened, and he made a sign to Fouinat, who disappeared, gliding through the half-open door as if he were entering the very wall.

“What’s the matter, little one?  Why, you’re all ’perlute’,” said the grandfather, seated behind his huge desk.