year, earned in fifteen years. As she spent little, and dined with her
father as long as he lived, and, as government securities were very
low during the last convulsions of the Empire, this result, which
seems at first sight exaggerated, explains itself.

On the death of their father, Brigitte and Jerome, the former being
twenty-seven, the latter twenty-three, united their existence. Brother
and sister were bound together by an extreme affection. If Jerome,
then at the height of his success, was pinched for money, his sister,
clothed in serge, and her fingers roughened by the coarse thread with
which she sewed her bags, would give him a few louis. In Brigitte's
eyes Jerome was the handsomest and most charming man in the whole
French Empire. To keep house for this cherished brother, to be
initiated into the secrets of Lindor and Don Juan, to be his
handmaiden, his spaniel, was Brigitte's dream. She immolated herself
lovingly to an idol whose selfishness, always great, was enormously
increased by her self-sacrifice. She sold her business to her
fore-woman for fifteen thousand francs and came to live with Thuillier
in the rue d'Argenteuil, where she made herself the mother, protectress,
and servant of this spoiled child of women. Brigitte, with the natural
caution of a girl who owed everything to her own discretion and her
own labor, concealed the amount of her savings from Jerome,--fearing,
no doubt, the extravagance of a man of gallantry. She merely paid a
quota of six hundred francs a year to the expenses of the household,
and this, with her brother's eighteen hundred, enabled her to make
both ends meet at the end of the year.

From the first days of their coming together, Thuillier listened to
his sister as to an oracle; he consulted her in his trifling affairs,
kept none of his secrets from her, and thus made her taste the fruit