of the room he saw his son and the foreman
reading books, which the "bear" took for proof-sheets. Then he would
join David at dinner and go back to Marsac, chewing the cud of uneasy
reflection.

Avarice, like love, has the gift of second sight, instinctively
guessing at future contingencies, and hugging its presentiments.
Sechard senior living at a distance, far from the workshop and the
machinery which possessed such a fascination for him, reminding him,
as it did, of days when he was making his way, could _feel_ that there
were disquieting symptoms of inactivity in his son. The name of
Cointet Brothers haunted him like a dread; he saw Sechard & Son
dropping into the second place. In short, the old man scented
misfortune in the wind.

His presentiments were too well founded; disaster was hovering over
the house of Sechard. But there is a tutelary deity for misers, and by
a chain of unforeseen circumstances that tutelary deity was so
ordering matters that the purchase-money of his extortionate bargain
was to be tumbled after all into the old toper's pouch.

Indifferent to the religious reaction brought about by the
Restoration, indifferent no less to the Liberal movement, David
preserved a most unlucky neutrality on the burning questions of the
day. In those times provincial men of business were bound to profess
political opinions of some sort if they meant to secure custom; they
were forced to choose for themselves between the patronage of the
Liberals on the one hand or the Royalists on the other. And Love,
moreover, had come to David's heart, and with his scientific
preoccupation and finer nature he had not room for the dogged greed of
which our successful man of business is made; it choked the keen
money-getting instinct which would have led him to study the
differences between the Paris trade and the business of a provincial
printing-house. The shades of opinion so sharply defined in the
country are blurred and lost in the great currents of Parisian
business life. Cointet Brothers set themselves deliberately to
assimilate all shades of monarchical opinion. They let every one know
that they fasted of a Friday and kept Lent; they haunted the
cathedral; they cultivated the society of the clergy; and in
consequence, when books of devotion were once more in demand, Cointet
Brothers were the first in this lucrative field. They slandered David,
accusing him of Liberalism, Atheism, and what not. How, asked they,
coul