"What will become of France," she cried to Albert's retreating back as he walked to and fro, "if none of the old families has a son to bless itself with? And Heaven knows that there are few enough remaining now. Besides, you will want to marry some day, and what will your bride say when you have no money? There are no _dots_ growing in the hedgerows now. Not that I am a stickler for a _dot_. Give me heart, I always say, and keep the money yourself. And some day you will find a loving heart, but no _dot_. And there is a tragedy at once--ready made. Is it not so, my old friend?" She turned to the Marquis de Gemosac for confirmation of this forecast. "It is a danger, Madame," was the reply. "It is a danger which it would be well to foresee." They had discussed a hundred times the possibility of a romantic marriage between their two houses. Juliette and Albert--the two last representatives of an old nobility long-famed in the annals of the west--might well fall in love with each other. It would be charming, Madame thought; but, alas! Albert would be wise to look for a _dot_. The Marquis paused. Again he temporised. For he could not all in an instant decide which side of this question to take. He looked at Albert, frail, romantic; an ideal representative of that old nobility of France which was never practical, and elected to go to the guillotine rather than seek to cultivate that modern virtue. "At the same time, Madame, it is well to remember that a loan offered now may reasonably be expected to bring such a return in the future as will provide _dots_ for the de Chantonnays to the end of time." Madame was about to make a spirited reply; she might even have suggested that the Beauvoir estate would be better apportioned to Albert's wife than to Juliette as the wife of another, but Albert himself stopped in front of them and swept away all argument by a passionate gesture of his small, white hand. "It is concluded," he said. "I sell the Beauvoir estate! Have not the Chantonnays proved a hundred times that they are equal to any sacrifice for the sake of France?" CHAPTER XXXV A SQUARE MAN All through the summer of 1851--a year to be marked for all time in the minds of historians, not in red, but in black letters--the war of politics tossed France hither and thither.