rsued Desiree, timidly, "I think that
you would do well to give up--"

"Eh?--what?--what's that?"

She paused when she saw the effect of her words. The old actor's mobile
features were suddenly contracted under the lash of violent despair; and
tears, genuine tears which he did not even think of concealing behind his
hand as they do on the stage, filled his eyes but did not flow, so
tightly did his agony clutch him by the throat. The poor devil began to
understand.

She murmured twice or thrice:

"To give up--to give up--"

Then her little head fell back upon the pillow, and she died without
having dared to tell him what he would do well to give up.

CHAPTER XIX

APPROACHING CLOUDS

One night, near the end of January, old Sigismond Planus, cashier of the
house of Fromont Jeune and Risler Aine, was awakened with a start in his
little house at Montrouge by the same teasing voice, the same rattling of
chains, followed by that fatal cry:

"The notes!"

"That is true," thought the worthy man, sitting up in bed; "day after
to-morrow will be the last day of the month. And I have the courage to
sleep!"

In truth, a considerable sum of money must be raised: a hundred thousand
francs to be paid on two obligations, and at a moment when, for the first
time in thirty years, the strong-box of the house of Fromont was
absolutely empty. What was to be done? Sigismond had tried several times
to speak to Fromont Jeune, but he seemed to shun the burdensome
responsibility of business, and when he walked through the offices was
always in a hurry, feverishly excited, and seemed neither to see nor hear
anything about him. He answered the old cashier's anxious questions,
gnawing his moustache:

"All right, all right, my old Planus. Don't disturb yourself; I will look
into it." And as he said it, he seemed to be thinking of something else,
to be a thousand leagues away from his surroundings. It was rumored in
the factory, where his liaison with Madame Risler was no longer a secret
to anybody, that Sidonie deceived him, made him very unhappy; and,
indeed, his mistress's whims worried him much more than his cashier's
anxiety. As for Risler, no one ever saw him; he passed his days shut up
in a room under the roof, overseeing the mysterious, interminable
manufacture of his machines.

This indifference on the part of the employers to the affairs of the
factory, this absolute lack of oversight, had led by slow degrees to
gener