master, strutted in their freshest liveries, watching their master's eye to satisfy the smallest want and obviate the slightest inconvenience.
But the Marquis soon lost the healthy appetite he had boasted about on his first arrival. The table seemed a lonely desert, the silence of respect and pleasure to express only gloom and apprehension. Little by little melancholy filled his mind and darkened his face; he let his hand fall lifeless beside his scarcely touched plate, and forgot the goblet where flashed in diamonds the wine of Aï and glowed the ruby nectar of old Burgundy.
Mere sadness grew into black despondency, and all followed with affright the progressive darkening of his mood. Suddenly a tear fell from his eyes. The Marquise sighed deeply, but he did not so much as notice her distress.
"I have been thinking," he observed presently to his wife, without preface or warning, "and I wish to be buried, not at Boissy-Saint-Leger, like my father and mother, but at Paris, in the Carmelite Church in the Place Maubert, with my ancestors."
"Why think of these things now, sir?" asked the Marquise, her voice choked with grief. " Surely we have time enough before us."
"Who can tell? Tell them to summon Bonbonne and bid him wait for me in my study. I wish to do an hour's work with him. Father Delar has convinced me how necessary it is. You have an excellent confessor in him, Madame."
"I am happy to find he pleases you, sir! you may put full confidence in him."
"I mean to apply to him, and that tomorrow. Now with your permission, Madame, I am going upstairs to my own rooms."
The Marquise raised her eyes to heaven and thanked God silently in her heart. Gazing after her husband as he left the room with Bonbonne, then turning to her sons, she said: '* In your prayers to-night, my children, ask God to inspire your father with the wish to reside amongst us for always, to strengthen his present good dispositions and give him grace to put them in practice."
Meantime the Marquis, arrived in his private room, said feverishly, " Now, my good Bonbonne, now, to work, to work!"—and he shook the papers littering the desk with an eager, trembling hand, as if to classify and master them all on the spot.
"Come, come," interposed the old man; "we are on the right road, so do not let us hurry too fast; ' more haste, less speed,' you know."
"Time presses, Bonbonne; I tell you, time presses."
"You don't say so!"
"I say that the man to whom God grants the joy of arranging duly for the last voyage of all can never work too fast to complete those preparations. Quick, Bonbonne, to work."
"At this rate, with this heat, sir, you will get a pleurisy, or a congestion, or a bad fever, and so justify yourself as havmg made your will just in the nick of time."
"A truce to delay. Where are the accounts of income?"
"Here they are."
"And those of expenditure? "
"Here."
"Deficit, sixteen hundred thousand livres. The Deuce!"
"Two years' savings will fill the gap."
"I have not two years to save in."
"Oh! you will drive me mad; what nonsense, with health like yours!"
"I think you told me that the Notary had drawn out a draft will, very cleverly expressed so as to secure to my sons the whole of the assets on their majority?"
"Yes, sir, on condition of your renouncing for six years a quarter of the income from the landed estates alone."
"Let me see the draft."
"Here it is."
"I am a trifle near-sighted. Kindly read it out to me."
Bonbonne proceeded to read each of the several provisions in order, the Marquis testifying from time to time his lively sense of satisfaction.
"It is an excellent scheme," he pronounced eventually,—" the more so, as it leaves Madame de Chauvelin in possession of a yearly income of three hundred thousand livres, twice what she enjoys now."
"So you approve? "
"Yes, in every respect."
"And I may engross the document?
"Pray do so."
"That done, you will have to execute it by appending your signature."
"Quick, Bonbonne, get it done quick!"
