d you take his number?"

"No. And you--didn't you notice it?"

"No."

They looked, thunderstruck, at each other. At last Loisel put on his
clothes.

"I shall go back on foot," said he, "over the whole route, to see
whether I can find it."

He went out. She sat waiting on a chair in her ball dress, without
strength to go to bed, overwhelmed, without any fire, without a thought.

Her husband returned about seven o'clock. He had found nothing.

He went to police headquarters, to the newspaper offices to offer a
reward; he went to the cab companies--everywhere, in fact, whither he
was urged by the least spark of hope.

She waited all day, in the same condition of mad fear before this
terrible calamity.

Loisel returned at night with a hollow, pale face. He had discovered
nothing.

"You must write to your friend," said he, "that you have broken the
clasp of her necklace and that you are having it mended. That will give
us time to turn round."

She wrote at his dictation.

At the end of a week they had lost all hope. Loisel, who had aged five
years, declared:

"We must consider how to replace that ornament."

The next day they took the box that had contained it and went to the
jeweler whose name was found within. He consulted his books.

"It was not I, madame, who sold that necklace; I must simply have
furnished the case."

Then they went from jeweler to jeweler, searching for a necklace like
the other, trying to recall it, both sick with chagrin and grief.

They found, in a shop at the Palais Royal, a string of diamonds that
seemed to them exactly like the one they had lost. It was worth forty
thousand francs. They could have it for thirty-six.

So they begged the jeweler not to sell it for three days yet. And they
made a bargain that he should buy it back for thirty-four thousand
francs, in case they should find the lost necklace before the end of
February.

Loisel possessed eighteen thousand francs which his father had left him.
He would borrow the rest.

He did borrow, asking a thousand francs of one, five hundred of another,
five louis here, three louis there. He gave notes, took up ruinous
obligations, dealt with usurers and all the race of lenders. He
compromised all the rest of his life, risked signing a note without even
knowing whether he could meet it; and, frightened by the trouble yet
to come, by the black misery that was about to fall upon him, by the
prospect of all the physical priv