the hermit. "If you do not
choose to pay till after the funeral, you are in your rights. I will
return in a week's time."

"The funeral!" cried the lawyer, starting up.

"The world moves on," said the old man, as he withdrew, "and the dead
move quickly in Paris!"

When Hulot, who stood looking down, was about to reply, the stalwart old
man had vanished.

"I don't understand one word of all this," said Victorin to himself.
"But at the end of the week I will ask him again about my father, if we
have not yet found him. Where does Madame Nourrisson--yes, that was her
name--pick up such actors?"

On the following day, Doctor Bianchon allowed the Baroness to go down
into the garden, after examining Lisbeth, who had been obliged to
keep to her room for a month by a slight bronchial attack. The learned
doctor, who dared not pronounce a definite opinion on Lisbeth's case
till he had seen some decisive symptoms, went into the garden with
Adeline to observe the effect of the fresh air on her nervous trembling
after two months of seclusion. He was interested and allured by the hope
of curing this nervous complaint. On seeing the great physician sitting
with them and sparing them a few minutes, the Baroness and her family
conversed with him on general subjects.

"You life is a very full and a very sad one," said Madame Hulot. "I
know what it is to spend one's days in seeing poverty and physical
suffering."

"I know, madame," replied the doctor, "all the scenes of which charity
compels you to be a spectator; but you will get used to it in time, as
we all do. It is the law of existence. The confessor, the magistrate,
the lawyer would find life unendurable if the spirit of the State did
not assert itself above the feelings of the individual. Could we live at
all but for that? Is not the soldier in time of war brought face to face
with spectacles even more dreadful than those we see? And every soldier
that has been under fire is kind-hearted. We medical men have the
pleasure now and again of a successful cure, as you have that of saving
a family from the horrors of hunger, depravity, or misery, and of
restoring it to social respectability. But what comfort can the
magistrate find, the police agent, or the attorney, who spend their
lives in investigating the basest schemes of self-interest, the social
monster whose only regret is when it fails, but on whom repentance never
dawns?

"One-half of society spends its life in watchi