od! Oh, my God!" she cried at last. "M. Grandguillot has gone
away!"

Pascal did not at first comprehend.

"Well, my girl, there is no hurry," he said; "you can go back another
day."

"No, no! He has gone away; don't you hear? He has gone away forever--"

And as the waters rush forth in the bursting of a dam, her emotion
vented itself in a torrent of words.

"I reached the street, and I saw from a distance a crowd gathered
before the door. A chill ran through me; I felt that some misfortune
had happened. The door closed, and not a blind open, as if there was
somebody dead in the house. They told me when I got there that he had
run away; that he had not left a sou behind him; that many families
would be ruined."

She laid the receipt on the stone table.

"There! There is your paper! It is all over with us, we have not a sou
left, we are going to die of starvation!" And she sobbed aloud in the
anguish of her miserly heart, distracted by this loss of a fortune, and
trembling at the prospect of impending want.

Clotilde sat stunned and speechless, her eyes fixed on Pascal, whose
predominating feeling at first seemed to be one of incredulity. He
endeavored to calm Martine. Why! why! it would not do to give up in
this way. If all she knew of the affair was what she had heard from the
people in the street, it might be only gossip, after all, which always
exaggerates everything. M. Grandguillot a fugitive; M. Grandguillot a
thief; that was monstrous, impossible! A man of such probity, a house
liked and respected by all Plassans for more than a century past. Why
people thought money safer there than in the Bank of France.

"Consider, Martine, this would not have come all of a sudden, like a
thunderclap; there would have been some rumors of it beforehand. The
deuce! an old reputation does not fall to pieces in that way, in a
night."

At this she made a gesture of despair.

"Ah, monsieur, that is what most afflicts me, because, you see, it
throws some of the responsibility on me. For weeks past I have been
hearing stories on all sides. As for you two, naturally you hear
nothing; you don't even know whether you are alive or dead."

Neither Pascal nor Clotilde could refrain from smiling; for it was
indeed true that their love lifted them so far above the earth that none
of the common sounds of existence reached them.

"But the stories I heard were so ugly that I didn't like to worry you
with them. I thought they wer