The second time the old bachelor went out he drove to Bourges, where, to escape the trouble of attending personally to the business, or, if you prefer it, being ordered to do so by Flore, he went before a notary and signed a power of attorney in favor of Maxence Gilet, enabling him to make all the transfers enumerated in the document.  Flore reserved to herself the business of making Monsieur sell out the investments in Issoudun and its immediate neighborhood.  The principal notary in Bourges was requested by Rouget to get him a loan of one hundred and forty thousand francs on his landed estate.  Nothing was known at Issoudun of these proceedings, which were secretly and cleverly carried out.  Maxence, who was a good rider, went with his own horse to Bourges and back between five in the morning and five in the afternoon.  Flore never left the old bachelor.  Rouget consented without objection to the action Flore dictated to him; but he insisted that the investment in the Funds, producing fifty thousand francs a year, should stand in Flore’s name as holding a life-interest only, and in his as owner of the principal.  The tenacity the old man displayed in the domestic disputes which this idea created caused Max a good deal of anxiety; he thought he could see the result of reflections inspired by the sight of the natural heirs.

Amid all these movements, which Max concealed from the knowledge of everyone, he forgot the Spaniard and his granary.  Fario came back to Issoudun to deliver his corn, after various trips and business manoeuvres undertaken to raise the price of cereals.  The morning after his arrival he noticed that the roof the church of the Capuchins was black with pigeons.  He cursed himself for having neglected to examine its condition, and hurried over to look into his storehouse, where he found half his grain devoured.  Thousands of mice-marks and rat-marks scattered about showed a second cause of ruin.  The church was a Noah’s-ark.  But anger turned the Spaniard white as a bit of cambric when, trying to estimate the extent of the destruction and his consequence losses, he noticed that the grain at the bottom of the heap, near the floor, was sprouting from the effects of water, which Max had managed to introduce by means of tin tubes into the very centre of the pile of wheat.  The pigeons and the rats could be explained by animal instinct; but the hand of man was plainly visible in this last sign of malignity.

Fario sat down on the steps of a chapel altar, holding his head between his hands.  After half an hour of Spanish reflections, he spied the squirrel, which Goddet could not refrain from giving him as a guest, playing with its tail upon a cross-beam, on the middle of which rested one of the uprights that supported the roof.  The Spaniard rose and turned to his watchman with a face that was as calm and cold as an Arab’s.  He made no complaint, but went home, hired laborers to gather into sacks what remained