least were never finished.

Madame Grandet had no thoughts at all as she went to bed. She heard the
miser walking up and down his room through the door of communication
which was in the middle of the partition. Like all timid women, she
had studied the character of her lord. Just as the petrel foresees the
storm, she knew by imperceptible signs when an inward tempest shook
her husband; and at such times, to use an expression of her own, she
"feigned dead."

Grandet gazed at the door lined with sheet-iron which he lately put to
his sanctum, and said to himself,--

"What a crazy idea of my brother to bequeath his son to me! A fine
legacy! I have not fifty francs to give him. What are fifty francs to a
dandy who looked at my barometer as if he meant to make firewood of it!"

In thinking over the consequences of that legacy of anguish Grandet was
perhaps more agitated than his brother had been at the moment of writing
it.

"I shall have that golden robe," thought Nanon, who went to sleep
tricked out in her altar-cloth, dreaming for the first time in her life
of flowers, embroidery, and damask, just as Eugenie was dreaming of
love.

* * * * *

In the pure and monotonous life of young girls there comes a delicious
hour when the sun sheds its rays into their soul, when the flowers
express their thoughts, when the throbbings of the heart send upward to
the brain their fertilizing warmth and melt all thoughts into a vague
desire,--day of innocent melancholy and of dulcet joys! When babes begin
to see, they smile; when a young girl first perceives the sentiment of
nature, she smiles as she smiled when an infant. If light is the first
love of life, is not love a light to the heart? The moment to see within
the veil of earthly things had come for Eugenie.

An early riser, like all provincial girls, she was up betimes and said
her prayers, and then began the business of dressing,--a business which
henceforth was to have a meaning. First she brushed and smoothed her
chestnut hair and twisted its heavy masses to the top of her head with
the utmost care, preventing the loose tresses from straying, and giving
to her head a symmetry which heightened the timid candor of her face;
for the simplicity of these accessories accorded well with the innocent
sincerity of its lines. As she washed her hands again and again in
the cold water which hardened and reddened the skin, she looked at her
handsome roun