lor in the neighborhood
declared that he had often seen her at night, on the roof of the house,
waiting for the hour of the witches' sabbath. This fact seemed the more
extraordinary because it was known to be the miser's custom to lock up
his sister at night in a bedroom with iron-barred windows.

As he grew older, Cornelius, constantly robbed, and always fearful of
being duped by men, came to hate mankind, with the one exception of the
king, whom he greatly respected. He fell into extreme misanthropy, but,
like most misers, his passion for gold, the assimilation, as it were,
of that metal with his own substance, became closer and closer, and age
intensified it. His sister herself excited his suspicions, though she
was perhaps more miserly, more rapacious than her brother whom she
actually surpassed in penurious inventions. Their daily existence had
something mysterious and problematical about it. The old woman rarely
took bread from the baker; she appeared so seldom in the market, that
the least credulous of the townspeople ended by attributing to these
strange beings the knowledge of some secret for the maintenance of life.
Those who dabbled in alchemy declared that Maitre Cornelius had the
power of making gold. Men of science averred that he had found the
Universal Panacea. According to many of the country-people to whom the
townsfolk talked of him, Cornelius was a chimerical being, and many of
them came into the town to look at his house out of mere curiosity.

The young seigneur whom we left in front of that house looked about him,
first at the hotel de Poitiers, the home of his mistress, and then at
the evil house. The moonbeams were creeping round their angles, and
tinting with a mixture of light and shade the hollows and reliefs of the
carvings. The caprices of this white light gave a sinister expression
to both edifices; it seemed as if Nature herself encouraged the
superstitions that hung about the miser's dwelling. The young man
called to mind the many traditions which made Cornelius a personage both
curious and formidable. Though quite decided through the violence of his
love to enter that house, and stay there long enough to accomplish his
design, he hesitated to take the final step, all the while aware that he
should certainly take it. But where is the man who, in a crisis of his
life, does not willingly listen to presentiments as he hangs above the
precipice? A lover worthy of being loved, the young man f