accepted the venomous reports which Chupin poured into his ears.

The suspicions which he was endeavoring to make Martial share were
cruelly unjust.

At the moment when the duke accused the baron of conspiring against the
house of Sairmeuse, that unfortunate man was weeping at the bedside of
his son, who was, he believed, at the point of death.

Maurice was indeed dangerously ill.

His excessively nervous organization had succumbed before the rude
assaults of destiny.

When, in obedience to M. Lacheneur's imperative order, he left the grove
on the Reche, he lost the power of reflecting calmly and deliberately
upon the situation.

Marie-Anne's incomprehensible obstinacy, the insults he had received
from the marquis, and Lacheneur's feigned anger were mingled in
inextricable confusion, forming one immense, intolerable misfortune, too
crushing for his powers of resistance.

The peasants who met him on his homeward way were struck by his singular
demeanor, and felt convinced that some great catastrophe had just
befallen the house of the Baron d'Escorval.

Some bowed; others spoke to him, but he did not see or hear them.

Force of habit--that physical memory which mounts guard when the mind is