He was even able to build it of bricks, and add an upper story to it.

But the work was scarcely finished, and life seemed to be on the point of expanding and smiling on them all, when misfortune returned, and typhoid fever, with brutal force, carried off Marguerite, after a week's illness.

She was then five and thirty, and her eldest boy, Thomas, was fourteen.

Thus Guillaume, distracted by his loss, found himself a widower at thirty-eight.

The thought of introducing any unknown woman into that retired home, where all hearts beat in tender unison, was so unbearable to him that he determined to take no other mate.