nks he shall find something for
you. He is as much astonished as I am that you seem to be left without
fortune. The doctor so often spoke both to him and to me of the
future he had prepared for you that neither of us can understand this
conclusion."

"Pooh!" she said; "so long as I can buy my godfather's books and
furniture and prevent their being dispersed, I am content."

"But who knows the price these infamous creatures will set on anything
you want?"

Nothing was talked of from Montargis to Fontainebleau but the million
for which the Minoret heirs were searching. But the most minute search
made in every corner of the house after the seals were removed, brought
no discovery. The one hundred and twenty-nine thousand francs of the
Portenduere debt, the capital of the fifteen thousand a year in the
three per cents (then quoted at 76), the house, valued at forty thousand
francs, and its handsome furniture, produced a total of about six
hundred thousand francs, which to most persons seemed a comforting sum.
But what had become of the money the doctor must have saved?

Minoret began to have gnawing anxieties. La Bougival and Savinien, who
persisted in believing, as did the justice of peace, in the existence
of a will, came every day at the close of each session to find out from
Bongrand the results of the day's search. The latter would sometimes
exclaim, before the agents and the heirs were fairly out of hearing,
"I can't understand the thing!" Bongrand, Savinien, and the abbe often
declared to each other that the doctor, who received no interest from
the Portenduere loan, could not have kept his house as he did on fifteen
thousand francs a year. This opinion, openly expressed, made the post
master turn livid more than once.

"Yet they and I have rummaged everywhere," said Bongrand,--"they to find
money, and I to find a will in favor of Monsieur de Portenduere. They
have sifted the ashes, lifted the marbles, felt of the slippers, bored
into the wood-work of the beds, emptied the mattresses, ripped up the
quilts, turned his eider-down inside-out, examined every inch of paper
piece by piece, searched the drawers, dug up the cellar floor--and I
have urged on their devastations."

"What do you think about it?" said the abbe.

"The will has been suppressed by one of the heirs."

"But where's the property?"

"We may whistle for it!"

"Perhaps the will is hidden in the library," said Savinien.

"Yes, and for that re