What she would do she knew not.

She thought long and hard.

Fifty things occurred to her, and fifty were set aside.

Her mother's immediate relatives in France were scattered or dead.

There was no longer any interest at Chambery in the watchmaking exile, who had dropped like a cherry-stone from the beak of the blackbird of persecution upon one of the Iles de la Manche.
There remained the alternative more than once hinted by the Sieur de Mauprat as the months grew into years after the mother died--marriage; a husband, a notable and wealthy husband.