one
o'clock. Three months of this horrible life restored Agathe to some
degree of confidence.

As for Joseph, who was working at the splendid picture to which he
afterwards owed his reputation, he lived in his atelier. On the
prediction of her grandson Bixiou, Madame Descoings believed in
Joseph's future glory, and she showed him every sort of motherly
kindness; she took his breakfast to him, she did his errands, she
blacked his boots. The painter was never seen till dinner-time, and
his evenings were spent at the Cenacle among his friends. He read a
great deal, and gave himself that deep and serious education which
only comes through the mind itself, and which all men of talent strive
after between the ages of twenty and thirty. Agathe, seeing very
little of Joseph, and feeling no uneasiness about him, lived only for
Philippe, who gave her the alternations of fears excited and terrors
allayed, which seem the life, as it were, of sentiment, and to be as
necessary to maternity as to love. Desroches, who came once a week to
see the widow of his patron and friend, gave her hopes. The Duc de
Maufrigneuse had asked to have Philippe in his regiment; the minister
of war had ordered an inquiry; and as the name of Bridau did not
appear on any police list, nor an any record at the Palais de Justice,
Philippe would be reinstated in the army early in the coming year.

To arrive at this result, Desroches set all the powers that he could
influence in motion. At the prefecture of police he learned that
Philippe spent his evenings in the gambling-house; and he thought it
best to tell this fact privately to Madame Descoings, exhorting her
keep an eye on the lieutenant-colonel, for one outbreak would imperil
all; as it was, the minister of war was not likely to inquire whether
Philippe gambled. Once restored to his rank under the flag of his
country, he would perhaps abandon a vice only taken up from idleness.
Agathe, who no longer received her friends in the evening, sat in the
chimney-corner reading her prayers, while Madame Descoings consulted
the cards, interpreted her dreams, and applied the rules of the
"cabala" to her lottery ventures. This jovial fanatic never missed a
single drawing; she still pursued her trey,--which never turned up. It
was nearly twenty-one years old, just approaching its majority; on
this ridiculous idea the old woman now pinned her faith. One of its
three numbers had stayed at the bottom of all the wheels