Page:Novels of Honoré de Balzac Volume 23.djvu/86

 of the omnipotence of his faculties and something immovable in his faith, never ceased contemplating the altar with a humble look, revived by hope, refusing to look at his nephew’s wife, planted almost in front of him as if to reproach him with this return to God.

Seeing all eyes turning upon her, Zélie hastened out, and returned to the market-place less precipitately than she had entered the church; she counted on this inheritance, and the inheritance was becoming problematical. She found the clerk, the tax-collector and their wives even more dismayed than before; Goupil had delighted in teasing them.

“We cannot talk over our affairs in the marketplace and before all the town,” said the postmistress; “come to my house. You will not be in the way, Monsieur Dionis,” she said to the notary.

In this way, the probable disinheriting of the Massins, the Crémières and the postmaster was to be the talk of the country.

Just as the heirs and the notary were about to cross the square on their way to the post-house, the sound of a diligence arriving full tilt at the office, which was a few steps from the church, at the top of the Grand’Rue, made a tremendous noise.

“Bless my soul! I am like you, Minoret, I am forgetting Désiré,” said Zélie. “Let us go and see him get down; he is almost a barrister, and it is a matter that concerns him.”

The arrival of a stage coach is always a distraction; but, when it is late, some incident is to be