Before long the rich bourgeois, who still met in Dionis's salon, noticed a great change in the manners and behavior of the man who had hitherto been so free of care.
"I don't know what has come to Minoret, he is all _no how_," said his wife, from whom he was resolved to hide his daring deed.
Everybody explained his condition as being, neither more nor less, ennui (in fact the thought now expressed on his face did resemble ennui), caused, they said, by the sudden cessation of business and the change from an active life to one of well-to-do leisure.
While Minoret was thinking only of destroying Ursula's life in Nemours, La Bougival never let a day go by without torturing her foster child with some allusion to the fortune she ought to have had, or without comparing her miserable lot with the prospects the doctor had promised, and of which he had often spoken to her, La Bougival.
"It is not for myself I speak," she said, "but is it likely that monsieur, good and kind as he was, would have died without leaving me the merest trifle?
--" "Am I not here ?" replied Ursula, forbidding La Bougival to say another word on the subject.
She could not endure to soil the dear and tender memories that surrounded that noble head--a sketch of which in black and white hung in her little salon--with thoughts of selfish interest.

To her fresh and beautiful imagination that sketch sufficed to make her _see_ her godfather, on whom her thoughts continually dwelt, all the more because surrounded with the things he loved and used,--his large duchess-sofa, the furniture from his study, his backgammon-table, and the piano he had chosen for her.

The two old friends who still remained to her, the Abbe Chaperon and Monsieur Bongrand, the only visitors whom she received, were, in the midst of these inanimate objects representative of the past, like two living memories of her former life to which she attached her present by the love her godfather had blessed.
After a while the sadness of her thoughts, softening gradually, gave tone to the general tenor of her life and united all its parts in an indefinable harmony, expressed by the exquisite neatness, the exact symmetry of her room, the few flowers sent by Savinien, the dainty nothings of a young girl's life, the tranquillity which her quiet habits diffused about her, giving peace and composure to the little home.

After breakfast and after mass she continued her studies and practiced; then she took her embroidery and sat at the window looking on the street.
At four o'clock Savinien, returning from a walk (which he took in all weathers), finding the window open, would sit upon the outer casing and talk with her for half an hour.

In the evening the abbe and Monsieur Bongrand came to see her, but she never allowed Savinien to accompany them.