her in this house in that room--Oh! in your presence,"
he said, hearing a growl of dissatisfaction among the heirs.

"What do you think of that?" said the collector to the post master and
the women, who seemed stupefied by the angry address of Bongrand.

"Call _him_ a magistrate!" cried the post master.

Ursula meanwhile was sitting on her little sofa in a half-fainting
condition, her head thrown back, her braids unfastened, while every now
and then her sobs broke forth. Her eyes were dim and their lids swollen;
she was, in fact, in a state of moral and physical prostration which
might have softened the hardest hearts--except those of the heirs.

"Ah! Monsieur Bongrand, after my happy birthday comes death and
mourning," she said, with the poetry natural to her. "You know, _you_,
what he was. In twenty years he never said an impatient word to me.
I believed he would live a hundred years. He has been my mother," she
cried, "my good, kind mother."

These simple thoughts brought torrents of tears from her eyes,
interrupted by sobs; then she fell back exhausted.

"My child," said the justice of peace, hearing the heirs on the
staircase. "You have a lifetime before you in which to weep, but you
have now only a moment to attend to your interests. Gather everything
that belongs to you in this house and put it into your own room at once.
The heirs insist on my affixing the seals."

"Ah! his heirs may take everything if they choose," cried Ursula,
sitting upright under an impulse of savage indignation. "I have
something here," she added, striking her breast, "which is far more
precious--"

"What is it?" said the post master, who with Massin at his heels now
showed his brutal face.

"The remembrances of his virtues, of his life, of his words--an image of
his celestial soul," she said, her eyes and face glowing as she raised
her hand with a glorious gesture.

"And a key!" cried Massin, creeping up to her like a cat and seizing a
key which fell from the bosom of her dress in her sudden movement.

"Yes," she said, blushing, "that is the key of his study; he sent me
there at the moment he was dying."

The two men glanced at each other with horrid smiles, and then at
Monsieur Bongrand, with a meaning look of degrading suspicion. Ursula
who intercepted it, rose to her feet, pale as if the blood had left her
body. Her eyes sent forth the lightnings that perhaps can issue only at
some cost of life, as she said in a choking