'Be quiet!' cried Pauline. 'I will bring him up, and you'll see if I don't make a man of him!' There was a moment's silence, while she clasped the child to her in a motherly embrace. 'Why don't you get married, as you're so fond of children?' Lazare asked. She looked at him in amazement. 'But I have a child! Haven't you given me one? I get married! Never! What an idea!' She dandled little Paul in her arms, and laughed yet more loudly as she declared that Lazare had quite converted her to the doctrines of the great Saint Schopenhauer, and that she would remain unmarried in order to be able to work for the universal deliverance. And she was, indeed, the incarnation of renunciation, of love for others and kindly charity for erring humanity. The sun was sinking to rest in the boundless waters, perfect serenity fell from the paling sky, the immensity of air and sea alike lay wrapped in all the mellow softness of the close of a lovely day. Far away over the water one single little white sail gleamed like a spark, but it vanished as the sun sank beneath the long line of the horizon; then there was nothing to be seen save the gradual deepening of the twilight over the motionless sea. And Pauline was still dandling the child, and laughing with brave gaiety as she stood between her despairing cousin and her moaning uncle, in the middle of the terrace, which was now growing bluish in the shadowy dusk. She had stripped herself of everything, but happiness rang out in her clear laugh. 'Aren't we going to dine this evening?' asked Louise, making her appearance in a coquettish dress of grey silk. 'I'm quite ready,' Pauline replied. 'I can't think what they can be doing in the garden.' At that moment Abbé Horteur came back, looking very much distressed. In reply to their anxious questions, after seeking for some phrase which would soften the shock, he ended by bluntly saying: 'We have just discovered poor Véronique hanging from one of your pear-trees.' They all raised a cry of surprise and horror, and their faces paled beneath the passing quiver of death. 'But what could make her do such a thing?' cried Pauline. 'She could have had no reason, and she had even to prepare the dinner. It can scarcely be because I told her that they had made her pay ten sous too much for her duck!' In his turn Doctor Cazenove now came up. For the last quarter of an hour he had been vainly trying to restore animation to the poor woman's body in the coach-house, whither Martin had helped him to carry it. One could never tell, he said, what such whimsical old servants would do. She had never really got over her mistress's death. 'It didn't take her long,' he added. 'She just strung herself up by the strings of one of her kitchen aprons.'