favorite niece, Charlotte de Kergarouet, now sixteen years of age. The
rector, Monsieur Grimont, was certainly in her confidence; it was he
who helped the old maid to invest her savings.

But Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoel might have had three hundred thousand
francs in gold, she might have had ten times the landed property she
actually possessed, and the du Guenics would never have allowed
themselves to pay her the slightest attention that the old woman could
construe as looking to her fortune. From a feeling of truly Breton
pride, Jacqueline de Pen-Hoel, glad of the supremacy accorded to her
old friend Zephirine and the du Guenics, always showed herself honored
by her relations with Madame du Guenic and her sister-in-law. She even
went so far as to conceal the sort of sacrifice to which she consented
every evening in allowing her page to burn in the Guenic hall that
singular gingerbread-colored candle called an /oribus/ which is still
used in certain parts of western France.

Thus this rich old maid was nobility, pride, and grandeur personified.
At the moment when you are reading this portrait of her, the Abbe
Grimont has just indiscreetly revealed that on the evening when the
old baron, the young chevalier, and Gasselin secretly departed to join
MADAME (to the terror of the baroness and the great joy of all
Bretons) Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoel had given the baron ten thousand
francs in gold,--an immense sacrifice, to which the abbe added another
ten thousand, a tithe collected by him,--charging the old hero to
offer the whole, in the name of the Pen-Hoels and of the parish of
Guerande, to the mother of Henri V.

Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoel treated Calyste as if she felt that her
intentions gave her certain rights over him; her plans seemed to