"Let me see if you do."
"The question you asked me just now as to what I thought of the house of Haut-Martel was intended to suggest a sort of compensation for the terrible disappointment my unworthy son has caused me."
"You are right, madame."
"And as you have unexpectedly become the head of an illustrious house, you do not want it to become extinct."
"There is some truth in that, also," replied the hunchback, not a little surprised at Madame de Senneterre's penetration, though he was far from suspecting the lady's real thought.
"Yes, I admit that I would not like the name to die out, madame," he added, after a slight pause.
"And as you know that only a carefully reared girl of noble birth would be capable of bearing this noble name as it should be borne, and of understanding the sacred obligations she would have to fulfil towards the man to whom she owed such a magnificent position, you are thinking of my eldest daughter,—and believe you can thus offer me an adequate compensation for the misery my son's insubordination has caused me."
"I! marry?" exclaimed the hunchback, even more revolted than surprised by Madame de Senneterre's heartless proposal.
But anxious to see how far the blindness, hardness of heart, and love of greed would carry this cruel parent, he responded with one of those half way refusals that seem to be made only in the hope of seeing them overcome.
"I think of such a marriage! Besides, even if I did, would there be any possibility of compassing it? Think of it, madame, at my age and deformed as I am, while your daughter Bertha is a charming girl of barely twenty. She would laugh in my face and she would do perfectly right."