d 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, or a father had stripped his children
of prospects and respectability. It was said laughingly, but we
thought of so many cases in point in ten minutes that I was struck
with the theory. The amount of truth in it furnished all sorts of
wild paradoxes, which journalists maintain cleverly enough for
their own amusement when there is nobody else at hand to mystify.
I bring bad luck to our family. My heart is full of love for you,
yet I behave like an enemy. The blow dealt unintentionally is the
cruelest blow of all. While I was leading a bohemian life in
Paris, a life made up of pleasure and misery; taking good
fellowship for friendship, forsaking my true friends for those who
wished to exploit me, and succeeded; forgetful of you, or
remembering you only to cause you trouble,--all that while you
were walking in the humble path of hard work, making your way
slowly but surely to the fortune which I tried so madly to snatch.
While you grew better, I grew worse; a fatal