which she kept.

"My poor girl," he said to her one evening, "what are you going to do
for your wages, now that we have no more money?"

She remained for a moment with her eyes fixed on the ground, with an air
of consternation, then she said:

"Well, monsieur, I must only wait."

But he saw that she had not said all that was in her mind, that she had
thought of some arrangement which she did not know how to propose to
him, so he encouraged her.

"Well, then, if monsieur would consent to it, I should like monsieur to
sign me a paper."

"How, a paper?"

"Yes, a paper, in which monsieur should say, every month, that he owes
me forty francs."

Pascal at once made out the paper for her, and this made her quite
happy. She put it away as carefully as if it had been real money.
This evidently tranquilized her. But the paper became a new subject of
wondering amusement to the doctor and his companion. In what did the
extraordinary power consist which money has on certain natures? This
old maid, who would serve him on bended knees, who adored him above
everything, to the extent of having devoted to him her whole life, to
ask for this silly guarantee, this scrap of paper which was of no value,
if he should be unable to pay her.

So far neither Pascal nor Clotilde had any great merit in preserving
their serenity in misfortune, for they did not feel it. They lived high
above it, in the rich and happy realm of their love. At table they did
not know what they were eating; they might fancy they were partaking of
a princely banquet, served on silver dishes. They were unconscious of
the increasing destitution around them, of the hunger of the servant
who lived upon the crumbs from their table; and they walked through the
empty house as through a palace hung with silk and filled with riches.
This was undoubtedly the happiest period of their love. The workroom had
pleasant memories of the past, and they spent whole days there, wrapped
luxuriously in the joy of having lived so long in it together. Then, out
of doors, in every corner of La Souleiade, royal summer had set up his
blue tent, dazzling with gold. In the morning, in the embalsamed walks
on the pine grove; at noon under the dark shadow of the plane trees,
lulled by the murmur of the fountain; in the evening on the cool
terrace, or in the still warm threshing yard bathed in the faint blue
radiance of the first stars, they lived with rapture their straitened
life, their o