As she was in her mere girlhood, it appeared that she was too young to marry, nor had ever thought of it; and more than all, as Adolphe was poor, having only his practice as a hard-working village practitioner, Monsieur de Caillé was by no means disposed to look upon him, even in the future, as an eligible suitor for his daughter, till a letter reached young Guerrand from Paris by which one morning he found himself rich by one of the most extraordinary chances in the world. It happened that just a week before the Prussians crossed the Rhine, Adolphe Guerrand had been at Blankenberg with a patient, to whom he had prescribed sea-bathing, and, when walking on the beach there, had found a carefully sealed bottle among some sea-weed. Holding it between him and the light, he saw that it contained a written document, and conceiving naturally that it was a message from the sea--the last farewell from some sinking ship, he drew the cork, and perused the damp paper, which was properly signed and dated, from on board a French vessel, which had sprung a leak, and was going down in the middle of the Atlantic. And thus it ran on, in French: 'About to perish by drowning, I commend my soul to God, the Blessed Virgin, and all the saints. I hereby constitute my sole heir the finder of this will, which I enclose in a glass bottle. The labour of years, my fortune amounts to two hundred and twenty thousand francs, and I am without a relation in the world. I wish the house I have resided in at Paris to be converted into a chapel of St. Dominique, my patron saint. The fortune is deposited in the hands of the notary, M. Vantin, in the Rue St. Honoré. _Ora pro me_. 'DOMINIQUE SOURDEVAL.' The letter was from Vantin, the notary, to the young doctor, who thus found himself suddenly rich, so all obstacles were removed to a union with Célandine, when she was a few years older, though the family of Adolphe was of humble origin and that of De Caillé ancient, and shone at the court of Louis XIII. It was of a Madame de Caillé that we are told, how when that monarch was once playing at shuttlecock with her at Versailles, it fell into her bosom, on which she desired his majesty to take it; but such was his royal delicacy that, to avoid the snare laid by the charming Lorrainer, he discreetly extricated the toy with the aid of the tongs. Thus, on the first day of Charlie's convalescence, the formal betrothal of the daughter of the house took place; and to him it seemed a very cold-blooded affair to the wild, passionate, and solemn episode between himself and Ernestine in that lonely church at Burtscheid. Adolphe was in his twenty-fifth year, naturally sanguine and enthusiastic; his clear-cut features and thoughtful eyes were now full of light and brightness; there was a greater springiness in his step, born of the knowledge that he was now rich and the inheritor of a fortune--the fortune of M. de Sourdeval, so mysteriously cast at his feet by the waves of the sea.