This opinion, openly expressed, made the post master turn livid more than once.
"Yet they and I have rummaged everywhere," said Bongrand,--"they to find money, and I to find a will in favor of Monsieur de Portenduere.

They have sifted the ashes, lifted the marbles, felt of the slippers, bored into the wood-work of the beds, emptied the mattresses, ripped up the quilts, turned his eider-down inside-out, examined every inch of paper piece by piece, searched the drawers, dug up the cellar floor--and I have urged on their devastations." "What do you think about it ?" said the abbe.
"The will has been suppressed by one of the heirs." "But where's the property ?" "We may whistle for it!" "Perhaps the will is hidden in the library," said Savinien.
"Yes, and for that reason I don't dissuade Ursula from buying it.

If it were not for that, it would be absurd to let her put every penny of her ready money into books she will never open." At first the whole town believed the doctor's niece had got possession of the unfound capital; but when it was known positively that fourteen hundred francs a year and her gifts constituted her whole fortune the search of the doctor's house and furniture excited a more wide-spread curiosity than before.

Some said the money would be found in bank bills hidden away in the furniture, others that the old man had slipped them into his books.

The sale of the effects exhibited a spectacle of the most extraordinary precautions on the part of the heirs.