d's benefit.

"Oh, let us go home," said poor Eve; "I have made a mistake."

A few minutes before sunset, the sound of a crowd rose from the steps
that lead down to L'Houmeau. Apparently some crime had been committed,
for persons coming from L'Houmeau were talking among themselves.
Curiosity drew Lucien and Eve towards the steps.

"A thief has just been arrested no doubt, the man looks as pale as
death," one of these passers-by said to the brother and sister. The
crowd grew larger.

Lucien and Eve watched a group of some thirty children, old women
and men, returning from work, clustering about the gendarmes, whose
gold-laced caps gleamed above the heads of the rest. About a hundred
persons followed the procession, the crowd gathering like a storm cloud.

"Oh! it is my husband!" Eve cried out.

_"David!"_ exclaimed Lucien.

"It is his wife," said voices, and the crowd made way.

"What made you come out?" asked Lucien.

"Your letter," said David, haggard and white.

"I knew it!" said Eve, and she fainted away. Lucien raised his sister,
and with the help of two strangers he carried her home; Marion laid her
in bed, and Kolb rushed off for a doctor. Eve was still insensible when
the doctor arrived; and Lucien was obliged to confess to his mother that
he was the cause of David's arrest; for he, of course, knew nothing of
the forged letter and Cerizet's stratagem. Then he went up to his room
and locked himself in, struck dumb by the malediction in his mother's
eyes.

In the dead of night he wrote one more letter amid constant
interruptions; the reader can divine the agony of the writer's mind from
those phrases, jerked out, as it were, one by one:--

"MY BELOVED SISTER,--We have seen each other for the last time. My
resolution is final, and for this reason. In many families there
is one unlucky member, a kind of disease in their midst. I am that
unlucky one in our family. The observation is not mine; it was
made at a friendly supper one evening at the _Rocher de Cancale_ by
a diplomate who has seen a great deal of the world. While we
laughed and joked, he explained the reason why some young lady or
some other remained unmarried, to the astonishment of the world
--it was 'a touch of her father,' he said, and with that he unfolded
his theory of inherited weaknesses. He told us how such and such a
family would have flourished but for the mother; how it was that a
son had ruined his father