he not keeping watch over the wealth of her son at the risk of her
life? Later, when news came of the horrible executions ordered by the
Convention, she slept, happy in the knowledge that her own treasure was
in safety, out of reach of peril, far from the scaffolds of the
Revolution. She loved to think that she had followed the best course,
that she had saved her darling and her darling's fortunes; and to this
secret thought she made such concessions as the misfortunes of the
times demanded, without compromising her dignity or her aristocratic
tenets, and enveloped her sorrows in reserve and mystery. She had
foreseen the difficulties that would beset her at Carentan. Did she not
tempt the scaffold by the very fact of going thither to take a
prominent place? Yet, sustained by a mother's courage, she succeeded in
winning the affection of the poor, ministering without distinction to
everyone in trouble; and made herself necessary to the well-to-do, by
providing amusements for them.

The procureur of the commune might be seen at her house, the mayor, the
president of the "district," and the public prosecutor, and even the
judges of the Revolutionary tribunals went there. The four first-named
gentlemen were none of them married, and each paid court to her, in the
hope that Mme. de Dey would take him for her husband, either from fear
of making an enemy or from a desire to find a protector.

The public prosecutor, once an attorney at Caen, and the Countess's man
of business, did what he could to inspire love by a system of devotion
and generosity, a dangerous game of cunning! He was the most formidable
of all her suitors. He alone knew the amount of the large fortune of
his sometime client, and his fervor was inevitably increased by the
cupidity of greed, and by the consciousness that he wielded an enormous
power, the power of life and death in the district. He was still a
young man, and, owing to the generosity of his behavior, Mme. de Dey
was unable as yet to estimate him truly. But, in despite of the danger
of matching herself against Norman cunning, she used all the craft and
inventiveness that Nature has bestowed on women to play off the rival
suitors one against another. She hoped, by gaining time, to emerge safe
and sound from her difficulties at last; for at that time Royalists in
the provinces flattered themselves with a hope, daily renewed, that the
morrow would see the end of the Revolution--a conviction that proved