by being there all day.
But--unexpected shock!--Madame Claes learned through the humiliating
medium of some women friends, who showed surprise at her ignorance,
that her husband constantly imported instruments of physical science,
valuable materials, books, machinery, etc., from Paris, and was on the
highroad to ruin in search of the Philosopher's Stone. She ought, so her
kind friends added, to think of her children, and her own future; it was
criminal not to use her influence to draw Monsieur Claes from the fatal
path on which he had entered.

Though Madame Claes, with the tone and manner of a great lady, silenced
these absurd speeches, she was inwardly terrified in spite of her
apparent confidence, and she resolved to break through her present
system of silence and resignation. She brought about one of those little
scenes in which husband and wife are on an equal footing; less timid at
such a moment, she dared to ask Balthazar the reason for his change,
the motive of his constant seclusion. The Flemish husband frowned, and
replied:--

"My dear, you could not understand it."

Soon after, however, Josephine insisted on being told the secret, gently
complaining that she was not allowed to share all the thoughts of one
whose life she shared.

"Very well, since it interests you so much," said Balthazar, taking his
wife upon his knee and caressing her black hair, "I will tell you that
I have returned to the study of chemistry, and I am the happiest man on
earth."

CHAPTER IV

Two years after the winter when Monsieur Claes returned to chemistry,
the aspect of his house was changed. Whether it were that society was
affronted by his perpetual absent-mindedness and chose to think itself
in the way, or that Madame Claes's secret anxieties made her less
agreeable than before, certain it is that she no longer saw any but
her intimate friends. Balthazar went nowhere, shut himself up in his
laboratory all day, sometimes stayed there all night, and only appeared
in the bosom of his family at dinner-time.

After the second year he no longer passed the summer at his
country-house, and his wife was unwilling to live there alone. Sometimes
he went to walk and did not return till the following day, leaving
Madame Claes a prey to mortal anxiety during the night. After causing
a fruitless search for him through the town, whose gates, like those of
other fortified places, were closed at night, it was impossible to send
into t