the Cointets one day, "and with your
intelligence you might come to have a share in the business."

"Where is the use of my being a good foreman?" returned Cerizet. "I am
an orphan, I shall be drawn for the army next year, and if I get a bad
number who is there to pay some one else to take my place?"

"If you make yourself useful," said the well-to-do printer, "why should
not somebody advance the money?"

"It won't be my gaffer in any case!" said Cerizet.

"Pooh! Perhaps by that time he will have found out the secret."

The words were spoken in a way that could not but rouse the worst
thoughts in the listener; and Cerizet gave the papermaker and printer a
very searching look.

"I do not know what he is busy about," he began prudently, as the master
said nothing, "but he is not the kind of man to look for capitals in the
lower case!"

"Look here, my friend," said the printer, taking up half-a-dozen sheets
of the diocesan prayer-book and holding them out to Cerizet, "if you
can correct these for us by to-morrow, you shall have eighteen francs
to-morrow for them. We are not shabby here; we put our competitor's
foreman in the way of making money. As a matter of fact, we might let
Mme. Sechard go too far to draw back with her _Shepherd's Calendar_,
and ruin her; very well, we give you permission to tell her that we
are bringing out a _Shepherd's Calendar_ of our own, and to call her
attention too to the fact that she will not be the first in the field."

Cerizet's motive for working so slowly on the composition of the almanac
should be clear enough by this time.

When Eve heard that the Cointets meant to spoil her poor little
speculation, dread seized upon her; at first she tried to see a proof of
attachment in Cerizet's hypocritical warning of competition; but before
long she saw signs of an over-keen curiosity in her sole compositor--the
curiosity of youth, she tried to think.

"Cerizet," she said one morning, "you stand about on the threshold, and
wait for M. Sechard in the passage, to pry into his private affairs;
when he comes out into the yard to melt down the rollers, you are there
looking at him, instead of getting on with the almanac. These things
are not right, especially when you see that I, his wife, respect his
secrets, and take so much trouble on myself to leave him free to give
himself up to his work. If you had not wasted time, the almanac would
be finished by now, and Kolb would be selling it, an