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good gold,--Well, where's my nephew?"

"He says he doesn't want anything to eat," answered Nanon; "that's not
good for him."

"So much saved," retorted her master.

"That's so," she said.

"Bah! he won't cry long. Hunger drives the wolves out of the woods."

The dinner was eaten in silence.

"My good friend," said Madame Grandet, when the cloth was removed, "we
must put on mourning."

"Upon my word, Madame Grandet! what will you invent next to spend
money on? Mourning is in the heart, and not in the clothes."

"But mourning for a brother is indispensable; and the Church commands
us to--"

"Buy your mourning out of your six louis. Give me a hat-band; that's
enough for me."

Eugenie raised her eyes to heaven without uttering a word. Her
generous instincts, slumbering and long repressed but now suddenly and
for the first time awakened, were galled at every turn. The evening
passed to all appearance like a thousand other evenings of their
monotonous life, yet it was certainly the most horrible. Eugenie sewed
without raising her head, and did not use the workbox which Charles
had despised the night before. Madame Grandet knitted her sleeves.
Grandet twirled his thumbs for four hours, absorbed in calculations
whose results were on the morrow to astonish Saumur. No one came to
visit the family that day. The whole town was ringing with the news of
the business trick just played by Grandet, the failure of his brother,
and the arrival of his nephew. Obeying the desire to gossip over their
mutual interests, all the upper and middle-class wine-growers in
Saumur met at Monsieur des Grassins, where terrible imprecations were
being fulminated against the ex-mayor. Nanon was spinning, and the
whirr of her wheel was the only sound heard beneath the gray rafters
of that silent hall.

"We don't waste our tongues," she said, showing her teeth, as large
and white as peeled almonds.

"Nothing should be wasted," answered Grandet, rousing himself from his
reverie. He saw a perspective of eight millions in three years, and he
was sailing along that sheet of gold. "Let us go to bed. I will bid my
nephew good-night for the rest of you, and see if he will take
anything."

Madame Grandet remained on the landing of the first storey to hear the
conversation that was about to take place between the goodman and his
nephew. Eugenie, bolder than her mother, went up two stairs.

"Well, nephew, you are in trouble. Yes, weep, that's natural. A father
is a father; but we must bear our troubles patiently. I am a good
uncle to you, remember that. Come, take courage! Will you have a
little glass of wine?" (Wine costs nothing in Saumur, and they offer
it as tea is offered in China.) "Why!" added Grandet, "you have got no
light! That's bad, very bad; you ought to see what you are about," and
he walked to the chimney-piece. "What's this?" he cried. "A wax
candle! How the devil did they filch a wax candle? The spendthrifts

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