ing the house.

It was a stunning blow. When she heard the accusation made against her
daughter, Madame Chebe rose in indignation. No one could ever make her
believe such a thing. Her poor Sidonie was the victim of an infamous
slander.

M. Chebe, for his part, adopted a very lofty tone, with significant
phrases and motions of the head, taking everything to himself as was his
custom. How could any one suppose that his child, a Chebe, the daughter
of an honorable business man known for thirty years on the street, was
capable of Nonsense!

Mademoiselle Planus insisted. It was a painful thing to her to be
considered a gossip, a hawker of unsavory stories. But they had
incontestable proofs. It was no longer a secret to anybody.

"And even suppose it were true," cried M. Chebe, furious at her
persistence. "Is it for us to worry about it? Our daughter is married.
She lives a long way from her parents. It is for her husband, who is
much older than she, to advise and guide her. Does he so much as think
of doing it?"

Upon that the little man began to inveigh against his son-in-law, that
cold-blooded Swiss, who passed his life in his office devising
machines, refused to accompany his wife into society, and preferred his
old-bachelor habits, his pipe and his brewery, to everything else.

You should have seen the air of aristocratic disdain with which M. Chebe
pronounced the word "brewery!" And yet almost every evening he went
there to meet Risler, and overwhelmed him with reproaches if he once
failed to appear at the rendezvous.

Behind all this verbiage the merchant of the Rue du
Mail--"Commission-Exportation"--had a very definite idea. He wished to
give up his shop, to retire from business, and for some time he had been
thinking of going to see Sidonie, in order to interest her in his new
schemes. That was not the time, therefore, to make disagreeable scenes,
to prate about paternal authority and conjugal honor. As for Madame
Chebe, being somewhat less confident than before of her daughter's
virtue, she took refuge in the most profound silence. The poor
woman wished that she were deaf and blind--that she never had known
Mademoiselle Planus.

Like all persons who have been very unhappy, she loved a benumbed
existence with a semblance of tranquillity, and ignorance seemed to her
preferable to everything. As if life were not sad enough, good heavens!
And then, after all, Sidonie had always been a good girl; why should she