The doctor so often spoke both to him and to me of the future he had prepared for you that neither of us can understand this conclusion." "Pooh!" she said; "so long as I can buy my godfather's books and furniture and prevent their being dispersed, I am content." "But who knows the price these infamous creatures will set on anything you want ?" Nothing was talked of from Montargis to Fontainebleau but the million for which the Minoret heirs were searching.

But the most minute search made in every corner of the house after the seals were removed, brought no discovery.

The one hundred and twenty-nine thousand francs of the Portenduere debt, the capital of the fifteen thousand a year in the three per cents (then quoted at 76), the house, valued at forty thousand francs, and its handsome furniture, produced a total of about six hundred thousand francs, which to most persons seemed a comforting sum.
But what had become of the money the doctor must have saved?
Minoret began to have gnawing anxieties.

La Bougival and Savinien, who persisted in believing, as did the justice of peace, in the existence of a will, came every day at the close of each session to find out from Bongrand the results of the day's search.

The latter would sometimes exclaim, before the agents and the heirs were fairly out of hearing, "I can't understand the thing!" Bongrand, Savinien, and the abbe often declared to each other that the doctor, who received no interest from the Portenduere loan, could not have kept his house as he did on fifteen thousand francs a year.