“Why?” asked the count.

“Vilquin is going to fail; and the Bourse thinks you are worth several millions.  What ill-luck for his son!”

“No one knows,” said Charles Mignon, coldly, “what my liabilities in India are; and I do not intend to take the public into my confidence as to my private affairs.  Dumay,” he whispered to his friend, “if Vilquin is embarrassed we could get back the villa by paying him what he gave for it.”

Such was the general state of things, due chiefly to accident, when on Sunday morning Canalis and La Briere arrived, with a courier in advance, at the villa of Madame Amaury.  It was known that the Duc d’Herouville, his sister, and his aunt were coming the following Tuesday to occupy, also under pretext of ill-health, a hired house at Graville.  This assemblage of suitors made the wits of the Bourse remark that, thanks to Mademoiselle Mignon, rents would rise at Ingouville.  “If this goes on, she will have a hospital here,” said the younger Mademoiselle Vilquin, vexed at not becoming a duchess.

The everlasting comedy of “The Heiress,” about to be played at the Chalet, might very well be called, in view of Modeste’s frame of mind, “The Designs of a Young Girl”; for since the overthrow of her illusions she had fully made up her mind to give her hand to no man whose qualifications did not fully satisfy her.

The two rivals, still intimate friends, intended to pay their first visit at the Chalet on the evening of the day succeeding their arrival.  They had spent Sunday and part of Monday in unpacking and arranging Madame Amaury’s house for a month’s stay.  The poet, always calculating effects, wished to make the most of the probable excitement which his arrival would case in Havre, and which would of course echo up to the Mignons.  Therefore, in his role of a man needing rest, he did not leave the house.  La Briere went twice to walk past the Chalet, though always with a sense of despair, for he feared to displease Modeste, and the future seemed to him dark with clouds.  The two friends came down to dinner on Monday dressed for the momentous visit.  La Briere wore the same clothes he had so carefully selected for the famous Sunday; but he now felt like the satellite of planet, and resigned himself to the uncertainties of his situation.  Canalis, on the other hand, had carefully attended to his black coat, his orders, and all those little drawing-room elegancies, which his intimacy with the Duchesse de Chaulieu and the fashionable world of the faubourg had brought to perfection.  He had gone into the minutiae of dandyism, while poor La Briere was about to present himself with the negligence of a man without hope.  Germain, as he waited at dinner could not help smiling to himself at the contrast.  After the second course, however, the valet came in with a diplomatic, that is to say, uneasy air.

“Does Monsieur le baron know,” he said to Canalis in a low voice, “that Monsieur the grand equerry is coming to Graville to get cured of the same illness which has brought Monsieur de La Briere and Monsieur le baron to the sea-shore?”