When Lazare had filled a couple of trunks with the various articles he required, and Malivoire's coach had come to fetch him and his luggage, Pauline went back into the house, feeling quite dazed and destitute of her former energy. Chanteau, still in great pain, turned to her and exclaimed: 'You will stop now, I hope! Stay and see me buried!' She was unwilling to make an immediate reply. Her trunk was still packed in her bedroom. She sat gazing at it for hours. Since the others were going to Paris, it would be wrong of her, she thought, to desert her uncle. She had but little confidence in her cousin's resolutions, but, at any rate, if he and his wife should come back, she would then be free to take her departure. And when Cazenove angrily told her that she was throwing away a splendid position for the sake of ruining her life amongst people who had lived upon her ever since her childhood, she virtually made up her mind. 'Be off with you!' Chanteau now repeated. 'If you are to gain so much money and become so happy that way, I won't keep you here bothering about an old cripple like me. Be off with you!' One morning, however, she replied to him: 'No, uncle, I am going to stay with you.' The Doctor, who was present, went off, raising his arms to heaven. 'Ah! there is no doing anything with that child! And what a hornets' nest she has got into! She will never get free of it--never!' IX Once more did the days glide by in the house at Bonneville. After a very cold winter there had come a rainy spring, and the sea, beaten by the downpour, looked like a huge lake of mud. Then the tardy summer had lasted into the middle of autumn, with heavy, oppressive suns, beneath whose overwhelming heat the blue immensity slumbered. And then the winter came round again, and another spring, and yet another summer, slipping away minute by minute, ever at the same speed, as the hours pursued their rhythmical march.