frequently thought of that poor creature.  His anguish-stricken mind had often dwelt upon her during the clear nights he had passed in Cayenne; and he had returned to France with a wild dream of meeting her again on some footway in the bright sunshine, even though he could still feel her corpse-like weight across his legs.  And yet, he thought, she might perhaps have recovered.  At times he received quite a shock while he was walking through the streets, on fancying that he recognised her; and he followed pink bonnets and shawl-draped shoulders with a wildly beating heart.  When he closed his eyes he could see her walking, and advancing towards him; but she let her shawl slip down, showing the two red stains on her chemisette; and then he saw that her face was pale as wax, and that her eyes were blank, and her lips distorted by pain.  For a long time he suffered from not knowing her name, from being forced to look upon her as a mere shadow, whose recollection filled him with sorrow.  Whenever any idea of woman crossed his mind it was always she that rose up before him, as the one pure, tender wife.  He often found himself fancying that she might be looking for him on that boulevard where she had fallen dead, and that if she had met him a few seconds sooner she would have given him a life of joy.  And he wished for no other wife; none other existed for him.  When he spoke of her, his voice trembled to such a degree that La Normande, her wits quickened by her love, guessed his secret, and felt jealous.

“Oh, it’s really much better that you shouldn’t see her again,” she said maliciously.  “She can’t look particularly nice by this time.”

Florent turned pale with horror at the vision which these words evoked.  His love was rotting in her grave.  He could not forgive La Normande’s savage cruelty, which henceforth made him see the grinning jaws and hollow eyes of a skeleton within that lovely pink bonnet.  Whenever the fish-girl tried to joke with him on the subject he turned quite angry, and silenced her with almost coarse language.

That, however, which especially surprised the beautiful Norman in these revelations was the discovery that she had been quite mistaken in supposing that she was enticing a lover away from handsome Lisa.  This so diminished her feeling of triumph, that for a week or so her love for Florent abated.  She consoled herself, however, with the story of the inheritance, no longer calling Lisa a strait-laced prude, but a thief who kept back her brother-in-law’s money, and assumed sanctimonious airs to deceive people.  Every evening, while Muche took his writing lesson, the conversation turned upon old Gradelle’s treasure.

“Did anyone ever hear of such an idea?” the fish-girl would exclaim, with a laugh.  “Did the old man want to salt his money, since he put it in a salting-tub?  Eighty-five thousand francs!  That’s a nice sum of money!  And, besides, the Quenus, no doubt, lied about it—­there was perhaps two or three times as much.  Ah, if I were in your place, I shouldn’t lose any time about claiming my share; indeed I shouldn’t.”