and
showed her intention of displaying in this last fete a luxury which
should refute the foolish lies of the community.

The preparations for this event required over a month, and it was called
the fete of the camellias. Immense quantities of that beautiful flower
were massed on the staircase, and in the antechamber and supper-room.
During this month the formalities for constituting the entail were
concluded in Paris; the estates adjoining Lanstrac were purchased, the
banns were published, and all doubts finally dissipated. Friends and
enemies thought only of preparing their toilets for the coming fete.

The time occupied by these events obscured the difficulties raised by
the first discussion, and swept into oblivion the words and arguments of
that stormy conference. Neither Paul nor his mother-in-law continued to
think of them. Were they not, after all, as Madame Evangelista had said,
the affair of the two notaries?

But--to whom has it never happened, when life is in its fullest flow, to
be suddenly changed by the voice of memory, raised, perhaps, too late,
reminding us of some important new fact, some threatened danger? On
the morning of the day when the contract was to be signed and the fete
given, one of these flashes of the soul illuminated the mind of Madame
Evangelista during the semi-somnolence of her waking hour. The words
that she herself had uttered at the moment when Mathias acceded to
Solonet's conditions, "Questa coda non e di questo gatto," were cried
aloud in her mind by that voice of memory. In spite of her incapacity
for business, Madame Evangelista's shrewdness told her:--

"If so clever a notary as Mathias was pacified, it must have been that
he saw compensation at the cost of _some one_."

That some one could not be Paul, as she had blindly hoped. Could it be
that her daughter's fortune was to pay the costs of war? She resolved to
demand explanations on the tenor of the contract, not reflecting on the
course she would have to take in case she found her interests
seriously compromised. This day had so powerful an influence on Paul de
Manerville's conjugal life that it is necessary to explain certain of
the external circumstances which accompanied it.

Madame Evangelista had shrunk from no expense for this dazzling fete.
The court-yard was gravelled and converted into a tent, and filled with
shrubs, although it was winter. The camellias, of which so much had
been said from Angouleme to Dax,