eving, Philippe was quietly getting matters in order at his
office. He had the audacity to give in his accounts with a statement
that, fearing some accident, he had retained eleven hundred francs at
his own house for safe keeping. The scoundrel left the office at five
o'clock, taking five hundred francs more from the desk, and coolly went
to a gambling-house, which he had not entered since his connection with
the paper, for he knew very well that a cashier must not be seen to
frequent such a place. The fellow was not wanting in acumen. His past
conduct proved that he derived more from his grandfather Rouget than
from his virtuous sire, Bridau. Perhaps he might have made a good
general; but in private life, he was one of those utter scoundrels who
shelter their schemes and their evil actions behind a screen of strict
legality, and the privacy of the family roof.

At this conjuncture Philippe maintained his coolness. He won at first,
and gained as much as six thousand francs; but he let himself be dazzled
by the idea of getting out of his difficulties at one stroke. He left
the trente-et-quarante, hearing that the black had come up sixteen times
at the roulette table, and was about to put five thousand francs on the
red, when the black came up for the seventeenth time. The colonel then
put a thousand francs on the black and won. In spite of this remarkable
piece of luck, his head grew weary; he felt it, though he continued to
play. But that divining sense which leads a gambler, and which comes in
flashes, was already failing him. Intermittent perceptions, so fatal to
all gamblers, set in. Lucidity of mind, like the rays of the sun, can
have no effect except by the continuity of a direct line; it can divine
only on condition of not breaking that line; the curvettings of chance
bemuddle it. Philippe lost all. After such a strain, the careless mind
as well as the bravest weakens. When Philippe went home that night
he was not thinking of suicide, for he had never really meant to kill
himself; he no longer thought of his lost place, nor of the sacrificed
security, nor of his mother, nor of Mariette, the cause of his ruin; he
walked along mechanically. When he got home, his mother in tears, Madame
Descoings, and Joseph, all fell on his neck and kissed him and brought
him joyfully to a seat by the fire.

"Bless me!" thought he, "the threat has worked."

The brute at once assumed an air suitable to the occasion; all the more
ea