If Carlotta had lived, without doubt Rovère would have made her his wife. He loved her with a deep and respectful tenderness. The poor girl died very suddenly, and there remained to Rovère only his dream. One of those remembrances of a fireside, one of those spectres which brush the forehead with their wings or the folds of their winding sheets, when in the solitude in which he has voluntarily buried himself the searcher after adventures recalls the past. The past of yesterday. Illusions, disillusions, old loves, miseries! Rovère gave to this brother of the dead girl the affection which he had felt for her. He remembered, also, the father's request. Pradès's son, passionate, eager to live, tempted in all his appetites, accepted as his due Rovère's truly paternal devotion, worked on the sympathy of this man, who, through pity and duty, too, gave to Charles a little of the affection which he had felt for the sister, almost his fiancee, and for the father, dead by his own hand. But, little by little, the solicitations, the unreasonable demands of Pradès, who, believing that he had a just claim on his father's old partner, found it very natural that Rovère should devote himself to him--these continual and pressing demands became for the Consul irritating obsessions. Rovère seemed to this young man, who was a spendthrift and a gambler--a gambler possessed with atavistic frenzy--a sort of living savings bank, from which he could draw without counting. His importunities at last seemed fatiguing and excessive, and Pradès was advised one beautiful day that he no longer need count from that moment on the generosity of his benefactor. All this happened at Buenos Ayres, and about the time of the Consul's departure for France. Rovère added to this very curt declaration a last benefit. He gave to the brother of the dead girl, to the son of Pradès, of the firm of Rovère and Pradès, a sum sufficient to enable him to live while waiting for better things, and he told the young man in proper terms that, as he had now no one to depend upon, that he had better take himself elsewhere to be hung. The word could not be, with the appetites and habits of Charles Pradès, taken in a figurative sense, and the young man continued his life of adventures, as tragic in their reality and as improbable as the reporters' melodramatic inventions. Then, at the end of his resources, after having searched for fortune among miners, weary of tramping about in America, he embarked one morning for Havre, with the idea that the best gold mine was still that living placer which he had exploited in Buenos Ayres, and which was called Pièrre Rovère.