rly made, I think."

"Then tell us the result: I repeat that you can speak freely before this
lady."

"Oh! monsieur, it won't take me long. You were quite right: there were
two apprentices at the wheelwright's at Saint-Pierre, and one of them
was Alexandre-Honore, the pretty blonde's child, the same that we took
together over yonder. He had been there, I found, barely two months,
after trying three or four other callings, and that explains my
ignorance of the circumstance. Only he's a lad who can stay nowhere, and
so three weeks ago he took himself off."

Constance could not restrain an exclamation of anxiety: "What! took
himself off?"

"Yes, madame, I mean that he ran away, and this time it is quite certain
that he has left the district, for he disappeared with three hundred
francs belonging to Montoir, his master."

La Couteau's dry voice rang as if it were an axe dealing a deadly
blow. Although she could not understand the lady's sudden pallor and
despairing emotion, she certainly seemed to derive cruel enjoyment from
it.

"Are you quite sure of your information?" resumed Constance, struggling
against the facts. "That is perhaps mere village tittle-tattle."

"Tittle-tattle, madame? Oh! when I undertake to do anything I do
it properly. I spoke to the gendarmes. They have scoured the whole
district, and it is certain that Alexandre-Honore left no address behind
him when he went off with those three hundred francs. He is still on the
run. As for that I'll stake my name on it."

This was indeed a hard blow for Constance. That lad, whom she fancied
she had found again, of whom she dreamt incessantly, and on whom she had
based so many unacknowledgable plans of vengeance, escaped her, vanished
once more into the unknown! She was distracted by it as by some
pitiless stroke of fate, some fresh and irreparable defeat. However, she
continued the interrogatory.

"Surely you did not merely see the gendarmes? you were instructed to
question everybody."

"That is precisely what I did, madame. I saw the schoolmaster, and I
spoke to the other persons who had employed the lad. They all told me
that he was a good-for-nothing. The schoolmaster remembered that he had
been a liar and a bully. Now he's a thief; that makes him perfect. I
can't say otherwise than I have said, since you wanted to know the plain
truth."

La Couteau thus emphasized her statements on seeing that the lady's
suffering increased. And what strange suf