Camille suddenly rose to go.

"She loves him," Derville thought.

Since that evening, Camille had been unwontedly attentive to the
attorney, who approved of her liking for Ernest de Restaud. Hitherto,
although she knew well that her family lay under great obligations to
Derville, she had felt respect rather than real friendship for him,
their relation was more a matter of politeness than of warmth of
feeling; and by her manner, and by the tones of her voice, she had
always made him sensible of the distance which socially lay between
them. Gratitude is a charge upon the inheritance which the second
generation is apt to repudiate.

"This adventure," Derville began after a pause, "brings the one romantic
event in my life to my mind. You are laughing already," he went on;
"it seems so ridiculous, doesn't it, that an attorney should speak of
a romance in his life? But once I was five-and-twenty, like everybody
else, and even then I had seen some queer things. I ought to begin at
the beginning by telling you about some one whom it is impossible that
you should have known. The man in question was a usurer.

"Can you grasp a clear notion of that sallow, wan face of his? I wish
the _Academie_ would give me leave to dub such faces the _lunar_
type. It was like silver-gilt, with the gilt rubbed off. His hair was
iron-gray, sleek, and carefully combed; his features might have been
cast in bronze; Talleyrand himself was not more impassive than this
money-lender. A pair of little eyes, yellow as a ferret's, and with
scarce an eyelash to them, peered out from under the sheltering peak of
a shabby old cap, as if they feared the light. He had the thin lips that
you see in Rembrandt's or Metsu's portraits of alchemists and shrunken
old men, and a nose so sharp at the tip that it put you in mind of a
gimlet. His voice was so low; he always spoke suavely; he never flew
into a passion. His age was a problem; it was hard to say whether he had
grown old before his time, or whether by economy of youth he had saved
enough to last him his life.

"His room, and everything in it, from the green baize of the bureau
to the strip of carpet by the bed, was as clean and threadbare as the
chilly sanctuary of some elderly spinster who spends her days in rubbing
her furniture. In winter time, the live brands of the fire smouldered
all day in a bank of ashes; there was never any flame in his grate. He
went through his day, from his uprising to