tions and called to the
cashier from the doorway, without entering:

"Good-morning, Pere So-and-So. I want to ask you a question."

He held the door half open, his hand upon the knob.

"When did we settle our last bill? I forgot to enter it."

Oh! it was a long while ago, a very long while, that their last bill
was settled. Fromont Jeune's receipt was dated in September. It was five
months ago.

The door was hastily closed. Another! Evidently it would be the same
thing everywhere.

"Ah! Monsieur Chorche, Monsieur Chorche," muttered poor Sigismond; and
while he pursued his journey, with bowed head and trembling legs, Madame
Fromont Jeune's carriage passed him close, on its way to the Orleans
station; but Claire did not see old Planus, any more than she had seen,
when she left her house a few moments earlier, Monsieur Chebe in his
long frock-coat and the illustrious Delobelle in his stovepipe hat,
turning into the Rue des Vieilles-Haudriettes at opposite ends, each
with the factory and Risler's wallet for his objective point. The young
woman was much too deeply engrossed by what she had before her to look
into the street.

Think of it! It was horrible. To go and ask M. Gardinois for a hundred
thousand francs--M. Gardinois, a man who boasted that he had never
borrowed or loaned a sou in his life, who never lost an opportunity
to tell how, on one occasion, being driven to ask his father for forty
francs to buy a pair of trousers, he had repaid the loan in small
amounts. In his dealings with everybody, even with his children, M.
Gardinois followed those traditions of avarice which the earth, the
cruel earth, often ungrateful to those who till it, seems to inculcate
in all peasants. The old man did not intend that any part of his
colossal fortune should go to his children during his lifetime.

"They'll find my property when I am dead," he often said.

Acting upon that principle, he had married off his daughter, the elder
Madame Fromont, without one sou of dowry, and he never forgave his
son-in-law for having made a fortune without assistance from him. For
it was one of the peculiarities of that nature, made up of vanity and
selfishness in equal parts, to wish that every one he knew should need
his help, should bow before his wealth. When the Fromonts expressed in
his presence their satisfaction at the prosperous turn their business
was beginning to take, his sharp, cunning, little blue eye would smile
ironically, a