harply, marching to the door as if
to go away.

"One moment, papa Cardot. You will be so good as to get your nephew out
of a scrape into which I led him; for he played the money of his master
and lost it, and I lend him a thousand francs to win it back, and he
lost that too."

"Miserable boy! you lost fifteen hundred francs at play at your age?"

"Oh, uncle, uncle!" cried poor Oscar, plunged by these words into all
the horrors of his position, and falling on his knees before his uncle,
with clasped hands, "It is twelve o'clock! I am lost, dishonored!
Monsieur Desroches will have no pity! He gave me the money for an
important affair, in which his pride was concerned. I was to get a paper
at the Palais in the case of Vandernesse versus Vandernesse! What will
become of me? Oh, save me for the sake of my father and aunt! Come
with me to Monsieur Desroches, and explain it to him; make some
excuse,--anything!"

These sentences were jerked out through sobs and tears that might have
moved the sphinx of Luxor.

"Old skinflint!" said the danseuse, who was crying, "will you let your
own nephew be dishonored,--the son of the man to whom you owe your
fortune?--for his name is Oscar Husson. Save him, or Titine will deny
you forever!"

"But how did he come here?" asked Cardot.

"Don't you see that the reason he forgot to go for those papers was
because he was drunk and overslept himself. Georges and his cousin
Frederic took all the clerks in his office to a feast at the Rocher de
Cancale."

Pere Cardot looked at Florentine and hesitated.

"Come, come," she said, "you old monkey, shouldn't I have hid him better
if there had been anything else in it?"

"There, take your five hundred francs, you scamp!" said Cardot to his
nephew, "and remember, that's the last penny you'll ever get from me.
Go and make it up with your master if you can. I'll return the thousand
francs which you borrowed of mademoiselle; but I'll never hear another
word about you."

Oscar disappeared, not wishing to hear more. Once in the street,
however, he knew not where to go.

Chance which destroys men and chance which saves them were both making
equal efforts for and against Oscar during that fateful morning. But he
was doomed to fall before a master who forgave no failure in any affair
he had once undertaken. When Mariette reached home that night, she
felt alarmed at what might happen to the youth in whom her brother took
interest and she wrote a ha