hands as if engulfed by an abyss. Even fishing rights, a stone

quarry and three mills disappeared. Nana passed over them like an

invading army or one of those swarms of locusts whose flight scours

a whole province. The ground was burned up where her little foot

had rested. Farm by farm, field by field, she ate up the man's

patrimony very prettily and quite inattentively, just as she would

have eaten a box of sweet-meats flung into her lap between

mealtimes. There was no harm in it all; they were only sweets! But