“Sir Thorn and Mrs. Brian were both English, and, so far, they had managed to live very pleasantly.  But old age was approaching; and they began to be fearful about the future, when they fell in with Sarah.  They divined her, as she had divined Maxime; and they saw in her an admirable means to secure a fortune.  They did not hesitate, therefore, to offer her a compact by which she was to be a full partner, although they themselves had to risk all they possessed,—­a capital of some twenty thousand dollars.  You have seen what these respectable people proposed to make of her,—­a snare and a pitfall.  They knew very well that her matchless beauty would catch fools innumerable, and bring in a rich harvest of thousand-franc-notes.

“The idea was by no means new, M. Champcey, as you seem to think; nor is the case a rare one.

“In almost all the capitals of Europe, you will find even now some of these almost sublimely beautiful creatures, who are exhibited in the great world by cosmopolitan adventurers.  They have six or seven years,—­eighteen to twenty-five,—­during which, their beauty and their tact may secure an immense fortune to themselves and their comrades; and according to chance, to their skill, or the whims or the folly of men, they end by marrying some great personage in high life, or by keeping a wretched gambling hell in the suburbs.  They may fall upon the velvet cushions of a princely carriage, or sink, step by step, to the lowest depths of society.

“M.  Elgin and Mrs. Brian had agreed that they would exhibit Sarah in Paris; that she was to marry a duke with any number of millions; and that they should be paid for their trouble by receiving an annual allowance of some ten thousand dollars.  But, in order to undertake the adventure with a good chance of success, it was indispensable that Sarah should lose her nationality as a Parisian; that she should rise anew, as an unknown star; and, above all, that she should be trained and schooled for the profession she was to practise.

“Hence the trip to America, and her long residence there.

“Chance had helped the wretches.  They had hardly landed, when they found that they could easily introduce the girl as the daughter of Gen. Brandon, just as Justin Chevassat had managed to become Maxime de Brevan.  In this way, Ernestine Bergot appeared at once in the best society of Philadelphia as Sarah Brandon.  Not less prudent than Maxime, M. Elgin also purchased, in spite of his limited means, for a thousand dollars, vast tracts of land in the western part of the State, where there was no trace of oil-wells, but where there might very well be a good many, and had them entered upon the name of his ward.

“Of all these measures, I have the evidence in hand, and can produce it at any moment.”

For some time already, Daniel and Henrietta had looked at each other with utter amazement.  They were almost dumfounded by the prodigious sagacity, the cunning, patience, and labor which the old dealer must have employed to collect this vast mass of information.  But he continued, after a short pause,—­