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Rh as Monsieur Dobouziez could have supposed. Many obstacles stood in her road, even though she was an heiress and exceedingly beautiful. Suitors dreaded her imperious and trenchant disposition and her love of ostentation. Admirers were not lacking. She had around her a perpetual swarm of men paying her attentions, a siege of flirting and gallantry, but no recognized suitor presented himself.

Cora and Angéle Vanderling, who were younger than Gina, had just married Athanasius and Gaston Saint-Fardier. They plagued her with secret confidences and vaunted the liberty of conjugal life. Both led their lymphatic husbands around by the nose and hesitated less than ever to flirt with the gallants. Saint-Fardier senior, overjoyed at having rid himself of his sons, had obtained positions for both of them, one with an exchange-broker, and the other in the office of a nautical assessor. Vanderling, on his part, had dowered his daughters very fairly. The two young couples lived in very high style, and the girls, who were becoming ever more radiant and dazzling in their beauty, abandoned themselves to every whim.

With Bergmans, Béjard still remained the most assiduous visitor at the Dobouziez's. Laurent, who now knew the shipowner's antecedents, did not hide his aversion for him. Inclined toward a vague mysticism, he now accounted for the moment of hallucination that had come to him on the excursion to Hemixem. To Laurent, Freddy Béjard seemed to exhale the corrosive vapor of acreoline, to embody in corporeal form the manslaughtering machines. He, therefore suffered indescribably at seeing this sinister and inauspicious satellite incessantly gravitate in the orbit of the radiant Gina. Béjard had an intuition