Only, the capricious Baroness, whom it was very easy to annoy, was perpetually taking offence. For a delayed letter, for thanks which seemed insufficient tribute to her generosity, she would declare that Mary or Charles no longer loved her, and as she looked upon affection merely as a marketable commodity, the little slips of paper referring to heirship were immediately replaced by others. Mary's wardrobe would fall to Selina. Charles's clock would leap into John's inheritance, who would be apprised of the fact in deep secret, until presently, for some unconscious fault, the clock would be temporarily bestowed upon Alphonse, and the wardrobe upon Rose. Variable book-keeping, which kindled among relatives inextinguishable hatreds. But the Baroness' masterpiece was the marriage between John and Rose. John was an overseer of highway and bridge construction. He loved his cousin Mary, who contributed by her needlework to the slender family earnings. The young people had been betrothed six months, when one fine day, without any known reason, the Baroness declared that Rose was the one for John, and John exactly suited to Rose. Great commotion. The fear of being disinherited kept every one concerned in subjection to the "dearly beloved Aunt." Mary, desperately weeping, was preached into promising to enter a convent, the Baroness paying her dowry; this for the dear sake of John, whose name she might unite in her prayers with that of the Providential Aunt, who mercifully opened the way of salvation to her. John, alas, was more easily persuaded than she, when he learned that he and Rose together would be chief heirs; and Rose, who had ideas of grandeur, and dreamt of nothing less than going on to the stage, lent herself with her whole heart to the comedy of love fatly remunerative. John was invited to give up his work and "live like a gentleman," and Rose's natural tendencies coöperating, the young couple, loaded down with gifts of sounding specie, spread themselves gloriously, under the happy eyes of the Baroness, in every description of silly extravagance. The Baron died of an attack of gout, a disease unknown to clodhoppers. His wealth passed to his wife. Rose and John had received on their marriage an income of only 10,000 francs, but they had the formal promise of the entire inheritance. Unfortunately, a week before her death, the Baroness was shocked by "a lack of regard" on Rose's part, which consisted in not having evinced a sufficiently vociferous despair at the recital of her Aunt's sufferings! By a will made in her last moments everything was bequeathed to the Church, in payment for numberless ceremonies whereby the utmost of celestial bliss was to be secured for the dying woman.