men"; and he turned with a
slow step into the Rue des Bourgeois.

"He has stolen the fortune of our poor Ursula," said Bongrand, "but how
can we ever find the proof?"

"God may--"

"God has put into us the sentiment that is now appealing to that man;
but all that is merely what is called 'presumptive,' and human justice
requires something more."

The abbe maintained the silence of a priest. As often happens in similar
circumstances, he thought much oftener than he wished to think of the
robbery, now almost admitted by Minoret, and of Savinien's happiness,
delayed only by Ursula's loss of fortune--for the old lady had privately
owned to him that she knew she had done wrong in not consenting to the
marriage in the doctor's lifetime.

CHAPTER XXI. SHOWING HOW DIFFICULT IT IS TO STEAL THAT WHICH SEEMS
VERY EASILY STOLEN

The following day, as the abbe was leaving the altar after saying mass,
a thought struck him with such force that it seemed to him the utterance
of a voice. He made a sign to Ursula to wait for him, and accompanied
her home without having breakfasted.

"My child," he said, "I want to see the two volumes your godfather
showed you in your dreams--where he said that he placed those
certificates and banknotes."

Ursula and the abbe went up to the library and took down the third
volume of the Pandects. When the old man opened it he noticed, not
without surprise, a mark left by some enclosure upon the pages, which
still kept the outline of the certificate. In the other volume he found
a sort of hollow made by the long-continued presence of a package, which
had left its traces on the two pages next to it.

"Yes, go up, Monsieur Bongrand," La Bougival was heard to say, and the
justice of the peace came into the library just as the abbe was putting
on his spectacles to read three numbers in Doctor Minoret's hand-writing
on the fly-leaf of colored paper with which the binder had lined the
cover of the volume,--figures which Ursula had just discovered.

"What's the meaning of those figures?" said the abbe; "our dear doctor
was too much of a bibliophile to spoil the fly-leaf of a valuable
volume. Here are three numbers written between a first number preceded
by the letter M and a last number preceded by a U."

"What are you talking of?" said Bongrand. "Let me see that. Good God!"
he cried, after a moment's examination; "it would open the eyes of an
atheist as an actual demonstration of