" said Brigitte, with a sneer.

"Yes, that which I received from my father and my mother, and which I
brought as my 'dot' to Monsieur Thuillier."

"And pray who invested it, this property, and made it give you twelve
thousand francs a year?"

"I have never asked you for any account of it," said Madame Thuillier,
gently. "If it had been lost in the uses you made of it, you would never
have heard a single word from me; but it has prospered, and it is just
that I should have the benefit. It is not for myself that I reserve it."

"Perhaps not; if this is the course you take, it is not at all sure that
you and I will go out of the same door long."

"Do you mean that Monsieur Thuillier will send me away? He must have
reasons for doing that, and, thank God! I have been a wife above
reproach."

"Viper! hypocrite! heartless creature!" cried Brigitte, coming to an end
of her arguments.

"Sister," said Madame Thuillier, "you are in my apartment--"

"Am I, you imbecile?" cried the old maid, in a paroxysm of anger. "If I
didn't restrain myself--"

And she made a gesture both insulting and threatening.

Madame Thuillier rose to leave the room.

"No! you shall not go out," cried Brigitte, pushing her down into her
chair; "and till Thuillier comes home and decides what he will do with
you you'll stay locked up here."

Just as Brigitte, her face on fire, returned to the room where she had
left Madame Colleville, her brother came in. He was radiant.

"My dear," he said to the Megaera, not observing her fury, "everything
is going on finely; the conspiracy of silence is broken; two papers,
the 'National' and a Carlist journal, have copied articles from us, and
there's a little attack in a ministerial paper."

"Well, all is not going on finely here," said Brigitte, "and if it
continues, I shall leave the barrack."

"Whom are you angry with now?" asked Thuillier.

"With your insolent wife, who has made me a scene; I am trembling all
over."

"Celeste make you a scene!" said Thuillier; "then it is the very first
time in her life."

"There's a beginning to everything, and if you don't bring her to
order--"

"But what was it about--this scene?"

"About madame's not choosing that la Peyrade should marry her
goddaughter; and out of spite, to prevent the marriage, she refused to
give anything in the contract."

"Come, be calm," said Thuillier, not disturbed himself, the admission of
the "Echo" into the polemic making ano