’My father is not the man to care very much what anybody says about such things.’

‘Perhaps not so much as he ought, George,’ said Madame Faragon, shaking her head.

After that George Voss went about the house for some hours, doing his work, giving his orders, and going through the usual routine of his day’s business.  As he did so, no one guessed that his mind was disturbed.  Madame Faragon had not the slightest suspicion that the matter of Marie’s marriage was a cause of sorrow to him.  She had felt the not unnatural envy of a woman’s mind in such an affair, and could not help expressing it, although Marie Bromar was in some sort connected with herself.  But she was sure that such an arrangement would be regarded as a family triumph by George,—­unless, indeed, he should be inclined to quarrel with his father for over-generosity in that matter of the dot.  ’It is lucky that you got your little bit of money before this affair was settled,’ said she.

‘It would not have made the difference of a copper sou,’ said George Voss, as he walked angrily out of the old woman’s room.  This was in the evening, after supper, and the greater part of the day had passed since he had first heard the news.  Up to the present moment he had endeavoured to shake the matter off from him, declaring to himself that grief—­or at least any outward show of grief—­would be unmanly and unworthy of him.  With a strong resolve he had fixed his mind upon the affairs of his house, and had allowed himself to meditate as little as might be possible.  But the misery, the agony, had been then present with him during all those hours,—­and had been made the sharper by his endeavours to keep it down and banish it from his thoughts.  Now, as he went out from Madame Faragon’s room, having finished all that it was his duty to do, he strolled into the town, and at once began to give way to his thoughts.  Of course he must think about it.  He acknowledged that it was useless for him to attempt to get rid of the matter and let it be as though there were no such persons in the world as Marie Bromar and Adrian Urmand.  He must think about it; but he might so give play to his feelings that no one should see him in the moments of his wretchedness.  He went out, therefore, among the dark walks in the town garden, and there, as he paced one alley after another in the gloom, he revelled in the agony which a passionate man feels when the woman whom he loves is to be given into the arms of another.

As he thought of his own life during the past year or fifteen months, he could not but tell himself that his present suffering was due in some degree to his own fault.  If he really loved this girl, and if it had been his intention to try and win her for himself, why had he taken his father at his word and gone away from Granpere?  And why, having left Granpere, had he taken no trouble to let her know that he still loved her?  As he asked himself