was wakened by
a curious sensation, and found his hands covered with his wife's tears
and saw her kneeling before him. Celestine had read the resignation. She
could measure the depth of his fall. They were now to be reduced to
live on four thousand francs a year; and that day she had counted up her
debts,--they amounted to something like thirty-two thousand francs! The
most ignoble of all wretchedness had come upon them. And that noble man
who had trusted her was ignorant that she had abused the fortune he
had confided to her care. She was sobbing at his feet, beautiful as the
Magdalen.

"My cup is full," cried Xavier, in terror. "I am dishonored at the
ministry, and dishonored--"

The light of her pure honor flashed from Celestine's eyes; she sprang up
like a startled horse and cast a fulminating glance at Rabourdin.

"I! I!" she said, on two sublime tones. "Am I a base wife? If I were,
you would have been appointed. But," she added mournfully, "it is easier
to believe that than to believe what is the truth."

"Then what is it?" said Rabourdin.

"All in three words," she said; "I owe thirty thousand francs."

Rabourdin caught his wife to his heart with a gesture of almost frantic
joy, and seated her on his knee.

"Take comfort, dear," he said, in a tone of voice so adorably kind
that the bitterness of her grief was changed to something inexpressibly
tender. "I too have made mistakes; I have worked uselessly for my
country when I thought I was being useful to her. But now I mean to take
another path. If I had sold groceries we should now be millionaires.
Well, let us be grocers. You are only twenty-eight, dear angel; in ten
years you shall recover the luxury that you love, which we must needs
renounce for a short time. I, too, dear heart, am not a base or common
husband. We will sell our farm; its value has increased of late. That
and the sale of our furniture will pay my debts."

/My/ debts! Celestine embraced her husband a thousand times in the
single kiss with which she thanked him for that generous word.

"We shall still have a hundred thousand francs to put into business.
Before the month is out I shall find some favorable opening. If luck
gave a Martin Falleix to a Saillard, why should we despair? Wait
breakfast for me. I am going now to the ministry, but I shall come back
with my neck free of the yoke."

Celestine clasped her husband in her arms with a force men do not
possess, even in their passiona