d and Cerizet, she tried to watch and
guess old Sechard's intentions. Trouble thrown away! Old Sechard,
never sober, never drunk, was inscrutable; intoxication is a double
veil. If the old man's tipsiness was sometimes real, it was quite
often feigned for the purpose of extracting David's secret from his
wife. Sometimes he coaxed, sometimes he frightened his
daughter-in-law.

"I will drink up my property; _I will buy an annuity_," he would
threaten when Eve told him that she knew nothing.

The humiliating struggle was wearing her out; she kept silence at
last, lest she should show disrespect to her husband's father.

"But, father," she said one day when driven to extremity, "there is a
very simple way of finding out everything. Pay David's debts; he will
come home, and you can settle it between you."

"Ha! that is what you want to get out of me, is it?" he cried. "It is
as well to know!"

But if Sechard had no belief in his son, he had plenty of faith in the
Cointets. He went to consult them, and the Cointets dazzled him of set
purpose, telling him that his son's experiments might mean millions of
francs.

"If David can prove that he has succeeded, I shall not hesitate to go
into partnership with him, and reckon his discovery as half the
capital," the tall Cointet told him.

The suspicious old man learned a good deal over nips of brandy with
the work-people, and something more by questioning Petit-Claud and
feigning stupidity; and at length he felt convinced that the Cointets
were the real movers behind Metivier; they were plotting to ruin
Sechard's printing establishment, and to lure him (Sechard) on to pay
his son's debts by holding out the discovery as a bait. The old man of
the people did not suspect that Petit-Claud was in the plot, nor had
he any idea of the toils woven to ensnare the great secret. A day came
at last when he grew angry and out of patience with the
daughter-in-law who would not so much as tell him where David was
hiding; he determined to force the laboratory door, for he had
discovered that David was wont to make his experiments in the workshop
where the rollers were melted down.

He came downstairs very early one morning and set to work upon the
lock.

"Hey! Papa Sechard, what are you doing there?" Marion called out. (She
had risen at daybreak to go to her papermill, and now she sprang
across to the workshop.)

"I am in my own house, am I not?" said the old man, in some confusion.