you apply to his wife?”
“M. de Chalusse isn’t married. He never has been married.”
From the expression of solicitude upon her guest’s features, Madame Vantrasson supposed he was racking his brain to discover some mode of escape from her present difficulties. “If I were in your place,” he said, “I should try to interest his relatives and family in my case——”
“The count has no relatives.”
“Impossible!”
“He hasn’t, indeed. During the ten years I was in his service, I heard him say more than a dozen times that he alone was left of all his family—that all the others were dead. People pretend that this is the reason why he is so immensely rich.”
M. Fortunat’s interest was no longer assumed; he was rapidly approaching the real object of his visit. “No relatives!” he muttered. “Who, then, will inherit his millions when he dies?”
Madame Vantrasson jerked her head. “Who can say?” she replied. “Everything will go to the government, probably, unless—— But no, that’s impossible.”
“What’s impossible?”
“Nothing. I was thinking of the count’s sister, Mademoiselle Hermine.”
“His sister! Why, you said just now that he had no relatives.”
“It’s the same as if he hadn’t; no one knows what has become of her, poor creature! Some say that she married; others declare that she died. It’s quite a romance.”
M. Isidore Fortunat was literally upon the rack; and to make his sufferings still more horrible, he dared not ask any direct question, nor allow his curiosity to become manifest, for fear of alarming the woman. “Let me see,” said he; “I think—I am sure that I have heard—or that I have read—I cannot say which—some story about a Mademoiselle de Chalusse. It was something terrible, wasn’t it?”
“Terrible, indeed. But what I was speaking of happened a long time ago—twenty-five or twenty-six years ago, at the very least. I was still in my own part of the country—at Besancon. No one knows
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