m
to you the next time we meet."

She arrived, loving, eager, full of alarm. How would he receive her? She
kissed him persistently to avoid an explanation at the outset.

He said to himself: "It will be time enough to enter on the matter
by-and-by. I will find an opportunity of doing so."

He did not find the opportunity, and said nothing, shirking before the
difficulty of opening this delicate subject. She did not speak of going
out, and was in every way charming. They separated about midnight, after
making an appointment for the Wednesday of the following week, for
Madame de Marelle was engaged to dine out several days in succession.

The next day, as Duroy, on paying for his breakfast, felt for the four
coins that ought to be remaining to him, he perceived that they were
five, and one of them a gold one. At the outset he thought that he had
received it by mistake in his change the day before, then he understood
it, and his heart throbbed with humiliation at this persistent charity.
How he now regretted not having said anything! If he had spoken
energetically this would not have happened.

For four days he made efforts, as numerous as they were fruitless, to
raise five louis, and spent Clotilde's second one. She managed, although
he had said to her savagely, "Don't play that joke of the other
evening's again, or I shall get angry," to slip another twenty francs
into his trouser pockets the first time they met. When he found them he
swore bitterly, and transferred them to his waistcoat to have them under
his hand, for he had not a rap. He appeased his conscience by this
argument: "I will give it all back to her in a lump. After all, it is
only borrowed money."

At length the cashier of the paper agreed, on his desperate appeals, to
let him have five francs daily. It was just enough to live upon, but not
enough to repay sixty francs with. But as Clotilde was again seized by
her passion for nocturnal excursions in all the suspicious localities in
Paris, he ended by not being unbearably annoyed to find a yellow boy in
one of his pockets, once even in his boot, and another time in his
watch-case, after their adventurous excursions. Since she had wishes
which he could not for the moment gratify himself, was it not natural
that she should pay for them rather than go without them? He kept an
account, too, of all he received in this way, in order to return it to
her some day.

One evening she said to him: "Would you be