ing mandate,
he arranged that fifty of his fine pictures, among them several of
those which Balthazar had formerly sold, should be brought to Douai
in Marguerite's absence, so that the Claes gallery might once more be
complete.

During the years that had elapsed since Balthazar Claes left his home,
Marguerite had visited her father several times, accompanied by her
sister or by Jean. Each time she had found him more and more changed;
but since her last visit old age had come upon Balthazar with alarming
symptoms, the gravity of which was much increased by the parsimony with
which he lived that he might spend the greater part of his salary in
experiments the results of which forever disappointed him. Though he was
only sixty-five years of age, he appeared to be eighty. His eyes were
sunken in their orbits, his eyebrows had whitened, only a few hairs
remained as a fringe around his skull; he allowed his beard to grow, and
cut it off with scissors when its length annoyed him; he was bent like a
field-laborer, and the condition of his clothes had reached a degree of
wretchedness which his decrepitude now rendered hideous. Thought still
animated that noble face, whose features were scarcely discernible
under its wrinkles; but the fixity of the eyes, a certain desperation
of manner, a restless uneasiness, were all diagnostics of insanity, or
rather of many forms of insanity. Sometimes a flash of hope gave him the
look of a monomaniac; at other times impatient anger at not seizing a
secret which flitted before his eyes like a will o' the wisp brought
symptoms of madness into his face; or sudden bursts of maniacal laughter
betrayed his irrationality: but during the greater part of the time, he
was sunk in a state of complete depression which combined all the phases
of insanity in the cold melancholy of an idiot. However fleeting and
imperceptible these symptoms may have been to the eye of strangers, they
were, unfortunately, only too plain to those who had known Balthazar
Claes sublime in goodness, noble in heart, stately in person,--a Claes
of whom, alas, scarcely a vestige now remained.

Lemulquinier, grown old and wasted like his master with incessant
toil, had not, like him, been subjected to the ravages of thought. The
expression of the old valet's face showed a singular mixture of
anxiety and admiration for his master which might easily have misled
an onlooker. Though he listened to Balthazar's words with respect, and
f