s at opposite ends, each with the
factory and Risler's wallet for his objective point. The young woman was
much too deeply engrossed by what she had before her to look into the
street.

Think of it! It was horrible. To go and ask M. Gardinois for a hundred
thousand francs--M. Gardinois, a man who boasted that he had never
borrowed or loaned a sou in his life, who never lost an opportunity to
tell how, on one occasion, being driven to ask his father for forty
francs to buy a pair of trousers, he had repaid the loan in small
amounts. In his dealings with everybody, even with his children, M.
Gardinois followed those traditions of avarice which the earth, the cruel
earth, often ungrateful to those who till it, seems to inculcate in all
peasants. The old man did not intend that any part of his colossal
fortune should go to his children during his lifetime.

"They'll find my property when I am dead," he often said.

Acting upon that principle, he had married off his daughter, the elder
Madame Fromont, without one sou of dowry, and he never forgave his
son-in-law for having made a fortune without assistance from him. For it
was one of the peculiarities of that nature, made up of vanity and
selfishness in equal parts, to wish that every one he knew should need
his help, should bow before his wealth. When the Fromonts expressed in
his presence their satisfaction at the prosperous turn their business was
beginning to take, his sharp, cunning, little blue eye would smile
ironically, and he would growl, "We shall see what it all comes to in the
end," in a tone that made them tremble. Sometimes, too, at Savigny, in
the evening, when the park, the avenues, the blue slates of the chateau,
the red brick of the stables, the ponds and brooks shone resplendent,
bathed in the golden glory of a lovely sunset, this eccentric parvenu
would say aloud before his children, after looking about him:

"The one thing that consoles me for dying some day is that no one in the
family will ever be rich enough to keep a chateau that costs fifty
thousand francs a year to maintain."

And yet, with that latter-day tenderness which even the sternest
grandfathers find in the depths of their hearts, old Gardinois would
gladly have made a pet of his granddaughter. But Claire, even as a child,
had felt an invincible repugnance for the former peasant's hardness of
heart and vainglorious selfishness. And when affection forms no bonds
between those who are se