quarter, and chat with the boy when I found him; and if it was
too miserable at home, he did not return with empty hands, you know. I
believe that the wretched Philip knew that I was helping his wife, and
that he closed his eyes to the fact, finding it rather convenient. I
will hurry on, for the story is too miserable. Some years have passed;
Philip plunging deeper in vice; but Catherine, whom I had helped all I
could, has educated her son, who is now a fellow of twenty years, good
and courageous like herself. He is not a workman; he is educated; he has
learned to draw at the evening schools, and he is now with an architect,
where he gets good wages. And though the house is saddened by the
presence of the drunkard, things go fairly well, for Camille is a great
comfort to his mother; and for a year or two, when I see Catherine--she
is so changed, the poor woman!--leaning on the arm of her manly son, it
warms my heart.

"But yesterday evening, coming out of my cook-shop, I met Camille; and
shaking hands with him--oh, he is not ashamed of me, and he doesn't
blush at a blouse covered with plaster--I saw that something was the
matter.

"'Let's see--what's the matter now?'

"'I drew the lot yesterday,' he replied, 'and I drew the number ten--a
number that sends you to die with fever in the colonies with the
marines. That will, at all events, send me there for five years, to
leave mother alone, without resources, with father, who has never been
drinking so much, who has never been so wicked. And it will kill her--it
will kill her! How cursed it is to be poor!'

"Oh, what a horrible night I passed! Think of it, monsieur le cure,
that poor woman's labor for twenty years destroyed in a minute by an
unhappy chance; because a child, rummaging in a sack, has drawn an
unfortunate number! In the morning I was broken as by age when I went to
the house we were building on the Boulevard Arago. Of what use is
sorrow? we must work all the same. So I mounted the scaffolding. We had
already built the house to the fourth story, and I began to place my
mortar. Suddenly I felt some one strike me on the shoulder. It was
Philip. He only worked now when the inclination seized him, and he was
apparently putting in a day's work to get something to drink; but the
builder, having a forfeit to pay if the building was not finished by a
certain date, accepted the first-comers.

V.

"I had not seen Philip for a long time, and it was with difficul