rtain point, leaves the
mind free, they are in some respects like women,--their thoughts turn
about the little events of life, and they contrive to get at their
hidden meaning.

Joseph had bought one of those magnificent chests or coffers of a past
age, then ignored by fashion, with which he decorated a corner of his
studio, where the light danced upon the bas-reliefs and gave full lustre
to a masterpiece of the sixteenth century artisans. He saw the necessity
for a hiding-place, and in this coffer he had begun to accumulate a
little store of money. With an artist's carelessness, he was in the
habit of putting the sum he allowed for his monthly expenses in a skull,
which stood on one of the compartments of the coffer. Since his brother
had returned to live at home, he found a constant discrepancy between
the amount he spent and the sum in this receptacle. The hundred francs
a month disappeared with incredible celerity. Finding nothing one day,
when he had only spent forty or fifty francs, he remarked for the
first time: "My money must have got wings." The next month he paid more
attention to his accounts; but add as he might, like Robert Macaire,
sixteen and five are twenty-three, he could make nothing of them. When,
for the third time, he found a still more important discrepancy, he
communicated the painful fact to Madame Descoings, who loved him, he
knew, with that maternal, tender, confiding, credulous, enthusiastic
love that he had never had from his own mother, good as she was,--a love
as necessary to the early life of an artist as the care of the hen is
to her unfledged chickens. To her alone could he confide his horrible
suspicions. He was as sure of his friends as he was of himself; and the
Descoings, he knew, would take nothing to put in her lottery. At
the idea which then suggested itself the poor woman wrung her hands.
Philippe alone could have committed this domestic theft.

"Why didn't he ask me, if he wanted it?" cried Joseph, taking a dab
of color on his palette and stirring it into the other colors without
seeing what he did. "Is it likely I should refuse him?"

"It is robbing a child!" cried the Descoings, her face expressing the
deepest disgust.

"No," replied Joseph, "he is my brother; my purse is his: but he ought
to have asked me."

"Put in a special sum, in silver, this morning, and don't take anything
out," said Madame Descoings. "I shall know who goes into the studio; and
if he is the only