“Yes, indeed you will, dear mother,” he replied.  “She has shown me the insufficiency of my education at an epoch when the nobles ought to possess a personal value in order to give life to their rank.  I was as far from the age we live in as Guerande is from Paris.  She has been, as it were, the mother of my intellect.”

“I cannot bless her for that,” said the baroness, with tears in her eyes.

“Mamma!” cried Calyste, on whose forehead those hot tears fell, two pearls of sorrowful motherhood, “mamma, don’t weep!  Just now, when I wanted to do her a service, and search the country round, she said, ‘It will make your mother so uneasy.’”

“Did she say that?  Then I can forgive her many things,” replied Fanny.

“Felicite thinks only of my good,” continued Calyste.  “She often checks the lively, venturesome language of artists so as not to shake me in a faith which is, though she knows it not, unshakable.  She has told me of the life in Paris of several young men of the highest nobility coming from their provinces, as I might do,—­leaving families without fortune, but obtaining in Paris, by the power of their will and their intellect, a great career.  I can do what the Baron de Rastignac, now a minister of State, has done.  Felicite has taught me; I read with her; she gives me lessons on the piano; she is teaching me Italian; she has initiated me into a thousand social secrets, about which no one in Guerande knows anything at all.  She could not give me the treasures of her love, but she has given me those of her vast intellect, her mind, her genius.  She does not want to be a pleasure, but a light to me; she lessens not one of my faiths; she herself has faith in the nobility, she loves Brittany, she—­”

“She has changed our Calyste,” said his blind old aunt, interrupting him.  “I do not understand one word he has been saying.  You have a solid roof over your head, my good nephew; you have parents and relations who adore you, and faithful servants; you can marry some good little Breton girl, religious and accomplished, who will make you happy.  Reserve your ambitions for your eldest son, who may be four times as rich as you, if you choose to live tranquilly, thriftily, in obscurity,—­but in the peace of God,—­in order to release the burdens on your estate.  It is all as simple as a Breton heart.  You will be, not so rapidly perhaps, but more solidly, a rich nobleman.”

“Your aunt is right, my darling; she plans for your happiness with as much anxiety as I do myself.  If I do not succeed in marrying you to my niece, Margaret, the daughter of your uncle, Lord Fitzwilliam, it is almost certain that Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoel will leave her fortune to whichever of her nieces you may choose.”

“And besides, there’s a little gold to be found here,” added the old aunt in a low voice, with a mysterious glance about her.