s is the wish of your unhappy
brother.
"LUCIEN."

"It is decreed that my poor boy should be unlucky in everything, and
even when he does well, as he said himself," said Mme. Chardon, as she
watched the men piling up the bags.

"We have had a narrow escape!" exclaimed the tall Cointet, when he was
once more in the Place du Murier. "An hour later the glitter of the
silver would have thrown a new light on the deed of partnership. Our
man would have fought shy of it. We have his promise now, and in three
months' time we shall know what to do."

That very evening, at seven o'clock, Cerizet bought the business, and
the money was paid over, the purchaser undertaking to pay rent for
the last quarter. The next day Eve sent forty thousand francs to
the Receiver-General, and bought two thousand five hundred francs of
_rentes_ in her husband's name. Then she wrote to her father-in-law and
asked him to find a small farm, worth about ten thousand francs, for her
near Marsac. She meant to invest her own fortune in this way.

The tall Cointet's plot was formidably simple. From the very first
he considered that the plan of sizing the pulp in the vat was
impracticable. The real secret of fortune lay in the composition of the
pulp, in the cheap vegetable fibre as a substitute for rags. He made up
his mind, therefore, to lay immense stress on the secondary problem of
sizing the pulp, and to pass over the discovery of cheap raw material,
and for the following reasons:

The Angouleme paper-mills manufacture paper for stationers. Notepaper,
foolscap, crown, and post-demy are all necessarily sized; and these
papers have been the pride of the Angouleme mills for a long while past,
stationery being the specialty of the Charente. This fact gave color to
the Cointet's urgency upon the point of sizing in the pulping-trough;
but, as a matter of fact, they cared nothing for this part of David's
researches. The demand for writing-paper is exceedingly small compared
with the almost unlimited demand for unsized paper for printers. As
Boniface Cointet traveled to Paris to take out the patent in his own
name, he was projecting plans that were like to work a revolution in his
paper-mill. Arrived in Paris, he took up his quarters with Metivier,
and gave his instructions to his agent. Metivier was to call upon the
proprietors of newspapers, and offer to deliver paper at prices below
those q