o succeed to the inheritance. He
was not aware that for two years old Jeremiah Brohl had been in his
dotage, and that his debtors mocked him while devouring his substance. A
fine inheritance! it was diminished to two or three rickety chairs,
four cracked walls that scarcely could stand upright, and some jewellery
concealed in a hiding-place that Samuel knew of. Old Jeremiah never had
been able to dispose of it for the price he required, and he preferred
to keep it rather than lower his charge. He had principles, which was
well for Samuel, as the jewellery was useful to him. He sold a necklace,
and set out for Bucharest, some one having told him that he certainly
would make his fortune there. He gave music-lessons; this wearisome
profession did not suit him, he could not endure the constraint and the
regular hours. The boys plagued him--he would willingly have wrung their
necks; the girls treated him like a dog--they never thought of his being
handsome, because they suspected him of being a Jew. Why had he gone
to Bucharest--a city where all Germans are Jews, and where Jews are
not considered men? Although he had earned a little money, he grew
melancholy, and he began to think seriously of killing himself."

Count Abel Larinski leaned forward, plucked a spray of heather, tickled
his lips with it, and began to laugh; then, striking his breast, he
said, in an undertone, "Thank God, Samuel Brohl is not dead, for he is
here!"

He spoke the truth: Samuel Brohl was not dead, and life was of value to
him, since he had met Mlle. Antoinette Moriaz in the cathedral in Chur.
It was Samuel Brohl who had come to Cormeilles, and who was seated, at
this moment, in the midst of a grove of oaks. Perhaps the lark that he
had heard singing a quarter of an hour before had recognised him, for it
had ceased singing. The peacock continued its screaming, and its doleful
cries sounded like a warning. Yes, the man seated among the heather,
employed in narrating his own history to himself, was indeed Samuel
Brohl, and the proof of this was that he had laughed, while Count Abel
Larinski never laughed; moreover, for four years the latter had been out
of the world. The second reason is, perhaps, the better.

He whom, with or without his consent, we shall call henceforth Samuel
Brohl, reproached himself for this access of levity, as he would have
reproached himself for a false note that had escaped him in executing a
Mozart sonata. He resumed his gr