t laughing! I did not doubt! It was not a sneer!"
cried Eve, on her knees before her husband. "But I see plainly now
that you were right to tell me nothing about your experiments and your
hopes. Ah! yes, dear, an inventor should endure the long painful
travail of a great idea alone, he should not utter a word of it even
to his wife. . . . A woman is a woman still. This Eve of yours could
not help smiling when she heard you say, 'I have found out,' for the
seventeenth time this month."

David burst out laughing so heartily at his own expense that Eve
caught his hand in hers and kissed it reverently. It was a delicious
moment for them both, one of those roses of love and tenderness that
grow beside the desert paths of the bitterest poverty, nay, at times
in yet darker depths.

As the storm of misfortune grew, Eve's courage redoubled; the
greatness of her husband's nature, his inventor's simplicity, the
tears that now and again she saw in the eyes of this dreamer of dreams
with the tender heart,--all these things aroused in her an unsuspected
energy of resistance. Once again she tried the plan that had succeeded
so well already. She wrote to M. Metivier, reminding him that the
printing office was for sale, offered to pay him out of the proceeds,
and begged him not to ruin David with needless costs. Metivier
received the heroic letter, and shammed dead. His head-clerk replied
that in the absence of M. Metivier he could not take it upon himself
to stay proceedings, for his employer had made it a rule to let the
law take its course. Eve wrote again, offering this time to renew the
bills and pay all the costs hitherto incurred. To this the clerk
consented, provided that Sechard senior guaranteed payment. So Eve
walked over to Marsac, taking Kolb and her mother with her. She braved
the old vinedresser, and so charming was she, that the old man's face
relaxed, and the puckers smoothed out at the sight of her; but when,
with inward quakings, she came to speak of a guarantee, she beheld a
sudden and complete change of the tippleographic countenance.

"If I allowed my son to put his hand to the lips of my cash box
whenever he had a mind, he would plunge it deep into the vitals, he
would take all I have!" cried old Sechard. "That is the way with
children; they eat up their parents' purse. What did I do myself, eh?
_I_ never cost my parents a farthing. Your printing office is standing
idle. The rats and the mice do all the printin