be troubled, mademoiselle; monsieur said he would be back at
eleven o'clock to breakfast. He didn't go to bed all night. At two in
the morning he was still standing in the parlor, looking through the
window at the laboratory. I was waiting up in the kitchen; I saw him; he
wept; he is in trouble. Here's the famous month of July when the sun is
able to enrich us all, and if you only would--"

"Enough," said Marguerite, divining the thoughts that must have assailed
her father's mind.

A phenomenon which often takes possession of persons leading sedentary
lives had seized upon Balthazar; his life depended, so to speak, on the
places with which it was identified; his thought was so wedded to his
laboratory and to the house he lived in that both were indispensable to
him,--just as the Bourse becomes a necessity to a stock-gambler, to whom
the public holidays are so much lost time. Here were his hopes; here the
heavens contained the only atmosphere in which his lungs could breathe
the breath of life. This alliance of places and things with men, which
is so powerful in feeble natures, becomes almost tyrannical in men of
science and students. To leave his house was, for Balthazar, to renounce
Science, to abandon the Problem,--it was death.

Marguerite was a prey to anxiety until the breakfast hour. The former
scene in which Balthazar had meant to kill himself came back to her
memory, and she feared some tragic end to the desperate situation in
which her father was placed. She came and went restlessly about the
parlor, and quivered every time the bell or the street-door sounded.

At last Balthazar returned. As he crossed the courtyard Marguerite
studied his face anxiously and could see nothing but an expression of
stormy grief. When he entered the parlor she went towards him to bid him
good-morning; he caught her affectionately round the waist, pressed her
to his heart, kissed her brow, and whispered,--

"I have been to get my passport."

The tones of his voice, his resigned look, his feeble movements, crushed
the poor girl's heart; she turned away her head to conceal her tears,
and then, unable to repress them, she went into the garden to weep at
her ease. During breakfast, Balthazar showed the cheerfulness of a man
who had come to a decision.

"So we are to start for Bretagne, uncle," he said to Monsieur Conyncks.
"I have always wished to go there."

"It is a place where one can live cheaply," replied the old man.

"