only man, he was told by practical persons, who was able to purchase
so large a property and pay for it on the spot. The Abbe Dutheil wrote
a line to Monsieur Bonnet, who came to Limoges at once, and was taken
to the hotel Graslin.

Veronique determined to ask the rector to dinner; but the banker would
not let him go up to his wife's apartment until he had talked to him
in his office for over an hour and obtained such information as fully
satisfied him, and made him resolve to buy the forest and domains of
Montegnac at once for the sum of five hundred thousand francs. He
acquiesced readily in his wife's wish that this purchase and all
others connected with it should be in fulfilment of the clause of the
marriage contract relative to the investment of her dowry. Graslin was
all the more ready to do so because this act of justice cost him
nothing, he having doubled the original sum.

At this time, when Graslin was negotiating the purchase, the
Navarreins domains comprised the forest of Montegnac which contained
about thirty thousand acres of unused land, the ruins of the castle,
the gardens, park, and about five thousand acres of uncultivated land
on the plain beyond Montegnac. Graslin immediately bought other lands
in order to make himself master of the first peak in the chain of the
Correzan mountains on which the vast forest of Montegnac ended. Since
the imposition of taxes the Duc de Navarreins had never received more
than fifteen thousand francs per annum from this manor, once among the
richest tenures of the kingdom, the lands of which had escaped the
sale of "public domain" ordered by the Convention, on account probably
of their barrenness and the known difficulty of reclaiming them.

When the rector went at last to Madame Graslin's apartment, and saw