"Understand that so long as Mdlle. Veuillot remains in your house, and is supplied with all she wants, all that is necessary and fitting, I will undertake to pay you twice the sum named by Monsieur Moreau. The poor girl could not exist on such a pittance. When the heir comes, of course he will take the arrangements in his own hands."

"Without doubt, without doubt," said Roulleau, quickly. "You are generous indeed, monsieur. When the young lady is aware of all that you have done in her behalf

"She will be aware of nothing," M. Deshouliéres interrupted with decision. "Recollect that money matters do not go beyond us. You will find out from Madame Roulleau whether the arrangement you sug gest is agreeable to herself, and if it meets with no opposition from Mademoiselle Veuillot, it may be considered an affair settled. I shall go to sleep with a mind relieved on one point at least."

When M. Deshouliéres was asleep, the little notary took out and unfastened a pocket-book, looked cautiously at the superscription of two letters, each addressed to M. Moreau, Château Ardron, and replaced them in his pocket with a grimace of satisfaction.

"Zénobie will be compelled to acknowledge that I

have arranged this little matter as well as she could have done it herself," he said to himself triumphantly. "If only this damp does not injure my chest!

"

CHAPTER IV.

"As is the woodbine's, so the woman's life."

-The Lost Tales of Miletus.

M. DESHOULIERES had lived nearly forty years in the world. He still wanted three or four years of that age, it is true, but he looked as if he had passed it, and perhaps this was the reason that he was in the habit of thinking of himself in round numbers as a man of forty. From one cause and another all his life had been comparatively solitary. He was an only child; his mother died while he was at a lycée; his father married again; the son had gone out into the world, worked and risen, until now he stood high in his profession, and had been much pressed by his more ambitious colleagues to give up the provinces and betake himself to Paris. Why he had not followed their advice, he could scarcely have said. No tie specially bound him to Charville, but, somehow or other, he had struck root in the strange old town,there was always some case in which he was interested, something that kept him from moving. The man

was too simple-minded, perhaps, to care for the city life which just stayed within the horizon of his thoughts, and never grew any nearer. He did not think enough about himself to be ambitious. And so it happened, that in spite of his noble kindly nature, always giving out of its abundance to others, he had lived all these years without any peculiar and special interest of his own; had lived until certain little habits, and fancies, and opinions had grown upon him,-a dread of women, a love of solitude, somewhat, perhaps, of a dislike to anything that took him out of his ordinary work and its groove. All that had happened in the past week was peculiarly distasteful to him. Here was a girl, in whom he was in no way interested, thrown suddenly upon his care, and in all probability an endless sea of troubles would rise out of the unwelcome charge; here was a mystery, and he hated mysteries with all his heart; here were already looks, hints, surmises. "By and by, I do not doubt, they will say that I poisoned the old man to secure his fortune," reflected the doctor, with a grim laugh. He was not accustomed to have his word doubted; and this suspicious cure's little drop of bitterness vexed him more than he confessed even to himself: it seemed a sort of forerunner of the world's opinion; and the world's opinion affects us all in some degree, say what we will to the contrary.

D

Therefore when little Roulleau made his cautious proposal about Mademoiselle Thérèse, M. Deshouliéres jumped gladly at it as an escape from one of his many difficulties. He had been thinking where he could place her, without much satisfaction having grown out of his thoughts, but, oddly enough, the Roulleau household had not hitherto presented itself as a permanent refuge. It was respectable, inoffensive; there was that wife, certainly, but M. Deshouliéres held a kind of half-shaped theory that women were seldom found to be so objectionable towards women as towards men,-and there seemed no kind of reason why Madame Roulleau should drive Thérèse as she drove Ignace; nay, more than once in that little disappointing expedition to Ardron he had felt inclined to sympathise with Madame. Yes, the Roulleau family might serve, yet every now and then his wishes wandered longingly away towards that still safer and less perplexing home, a convent; if Thérèse could only feel a vocation in that direction, she might be placed at once with the good Sisters in the town. Then his responsibility would be at an end. M. Deshouliéres found himself devoutly wishing it might be brought to so happy a conclusion.

A little soft patter of rain was falling as the two men walked from the station to M. Roulleau's abode; the young leaves looked a brighter green, the sky