The baroness retired to rest early; and she was no sooner gone than
Josephine leaned over to Rose, and told her what their mother had
said to the oak-tree. Rose heard this with anxiety; hitherto they had
carefully concealed from their mother that the government claimed the
right of selling the chateau to pay the creditors, etc.; and now both
sisters feared the old lady had discovered it somehow, or why that
strange thing she had said to the oak-tree? But Dr. Aubertin caught
their remarks, and laid down his immortal MS. on French insects, to
express his hope that they were putting a forced interpretation on the
baroness's words.

"I think," said he, "she merely meant how short-lived are we all
compared with this ancient oak. I should be very sorry to adopt the
other interpretation; for if she knows she can at any moment be expelled
from Beaurepaire, it will be almost as bad for her as the calamity
itself; THAT, I think, would kill her."

"Why so?" said Rose, eagerly. "What is this house or that? Mamma will
still have her daughters' love, go where she will."

Aubertin replied, "It is idle to deceive ourselves; at her age men and
women hang to life by their habits; take her away from her chateau, from
the little oratory where she prays every day for the departed, from her
place in the sun on the south terrace, and from all the memories that
surround her here; she would soon pine, and die."

Here the savant seeing a hobby-horse near, caught him and jumped on. He
launched into a treatise upon the vitality of human beings, and proved
that it is the mind which keeps the body of a man alive for so great a