“I have thought of that danger,” he replied.  “When I go back, I shall tell the two Chevassats a little story, which will frighten them, so that they will advise Brevan never to appear there, except at night, as he formerly did.”

Thereupon he bowed to Henrietta, and went away with the words,—­

“To-morrow we will consult with each other.”

The shipwrecked man who is saved at the last moment, when, strength and spirits being alike exhausted, he feels himself sinking into the abyss, cannot, upon feeling once more firm ground under his feet, experience a sense of greater happiness than Henrietta did that night.  For the delicious sensation had become deeper and intenser by the evening spent in company with Papa Ravinet’s sister.

The widow, free from embarrassment as from affectation, possessed a quiet dignity which appeared in certain words and ways she had, and which made Henrietta guess the principal events of her life.  Ruined all of a sudden,—­she did not say how,—­some months after the death of her husband, she, who had been accustomed to all the comforts of opulence had seen herself reduced to poverty, and all its privations.  This had happened about five years ago.  Since then she had imposed upon herself the strictest economy, although she never neglected her appearance.  She had but one servant, who came every morning to clean up the house; she herself did all the other work, washing and ironing her own linen, cooking only twice a week, and eating cold meat on the other days, as much to save money as to save time.

For her time had its value.  She worked on her frame patterns for embroideries, for which a fashionable store paid her very good prices.  There were days in summer when she earned three francs.

The blow had been a severe one; she did not conceal it.  Gradually, however, she had become reconciled to it, and taken up this habit of economizing with unflinching severity, and down to the smallest details.  At present, she felt in these very privations a kind of secret satisfaction which results from the sense of having accomplished a duty,—­a satisfaction all the greater, the harder the duty is.

What duty, she did not say.

“That lady is a noble creature among many!” said Henrietta to herself that night, when she retired after a modest repast.

Still she could not get over the mystery which surrounded the lives of these two personages, whom fate, relenting at last, had placed in her way.  What was the mystery in the past of this brother and sister?  For there was one; and, so far from trying to conceal it, they had begged Henrietta not to inquire into it.  And how was their past connected with her own past?  How could their future depend in any way on her own future?

But fatigue soon made an end to her meditations, and confused her ideas; and, for the first time in two years, she fell asleep with a sense of perfect security; she slept peacefully, without starting at the slightest noise, without being troubled by silence, without wondering whether her enemies were watching her, without suspecting the very walls of her room.