chair, with no fire, her mind a blank.

Her husband returned about seven o'clock. He had found nothing.

He went to police headquarters, to the newspapers to offer a reward, to
the cab companies, everywhere, in short, where a trace of hope led him.

She watched all day, in the same state of blank despair before this
frightful disaster.

Loisel returned in the evening with cheeks hollow and pale; he had found
nothing.

"You must write to your friend," said he, "that you have broken the
clasp of her necklace and that you are having it repaired. It will give
us time to turn around."

She wrote as he dictated.

* * * * *

At the end of a week they had lost all hope.

And Loisel, looking five years older, declared:

"We must consider how to replace the necklace."

The next day they took the box which had contained it, and went to the
place of the jeweller whose name they found inside. He consulted his
books.

"It was not I, madame, who sold the necklace; I must simply have
furnished the casket."

Then they went from jeweller to jeweller, looking for an ornament like
the other, consulting their memories, both sick with grief and anguish.

They found, in a shop at the Palais Royal, a string of diamonds which
seemed to them exactly what they were looking for. It was worth forty
thousand francs.[*] They could have it for thirty-six thousand.

[* A franc is equal to twenty cents of our money.]

So they begged the jeweller not to sell it for three days. And they made
an arrangement that he should take it back for thirty-four thousand
francs if the other were found before the end of February.

Loisel had eighteen thousand francs which his father had left him. He
would borrow the rest.

He did borrow, asking a thousand francs of one, five hundred of another,
five louis here, three louis there. He gave notes, made ruinous
engagements, dealt with usurers, with all the tribe of money-lenders. He
compromised the rest of his life, risked his signature without knowing
if he might not be involving his honor, and, terrified by the anguish
yet to come, by the black misery about to fall upon him, by the prospect
of every physical privation and every mental torture, he went to get the
new necklace, and laid down on the dealer's counter thirty-six thousand
francs.

When Madame Loisel took the necklace back to Madame Forestier, the
latter said coldly:

"You should have returned it sooner,