of angelic gentleness and melancholy. Her imprisonment and the
condemnation of her father were as nothing to her. Had she not a map of
the world, the little bench, the garden, the angle of the wall? Did she
not taste upon her lips the honey that love's kisses left there? She
was ignorant for a time that the town talked about her, just as Grandet
himself was ignorant of it. Pious and pure in heart before God, her
conscience and her love helped her to suffer patiently the wrath and
vengeance of her father.

One deep grief silenced all others. Her mother, that gentle, tender
creature, made beautiful by the light which shone from the inner to the
outer as she approached the tomb,--her mother was perishing from day to
day. Eugenie often reproached herself as the innocent cause of the slow,
cruel malady that was wasting her away. This remorse, though her mother
soothed it, bound her still closer to her love. Every morning, as soon
as her father left the house, she went to the bedside of her mother,
and there Nanon brought her breakfast. The poor girl, sad, and suffering
through the sufferings of her mother, would turn her face to the old
servant with a mute gesture, weeping, and yet not daring to speak of her
cousin. It was Madame Grandet who first found courage to say,--

"Where is _he_? Why does _he_ not write?"

"Let us think about him, mother, but not speak of him. You are ill--you,
before all."

"All" meant "him."

"My child," said Madame Grandet, "I do not wish to live. God protects me
and enables me to look with joy to the end of my misery."

Every utterance of this woman was unfalteringly pious and Christian.
Sometimes, during the first months of the year, when her husband came
to breakfast with her and tramped up and down the room, she would say
to him a few religious words, always spoken with angelic sweetness, yet
with the firmness of a woman to whom approaching death lends a courage
she had lacked in life.

"Monsieur, I thank you for the interest you take in my health," she
would answer when he made some commonplace inquiry; "but if you really
desire to render my last moments less bitter and to ease my grief, take
back your daughter: be a Christian, a husband, and a father."

When he heard these words, Grandet would sit down by the bed with the
air of a man who sees the rain coming and quietly gets under the shelter
of a gateway till it is over. When these touching, tender, and religious
supplications ha