d water-color. Every Sunday Peyrade
dined at home with her. On that day this worthy was wholly paternal.

Lydie, religious but not a bigot, took the Sacrament at Easter, and
confessed every month. Still, she allowed herself from time to time to
be treated to the play. She walked in the Tuileries when it was fine.
These were all her pleasures, for she led a sedentary life. Lydie, who
worshiped her father, knew absolutely nothing of his sinister gifts and
dark employments. Not a wish had ever disturbed this pure child's pure
life. Slight and handsome like her mother, gifted with an exquisite
voice, and a delicate face framed in fine fair hair, she looked like
one of those angels, mystical rather than real, which some of the early
painters grouped in the background of the Holy Family. The glance of her
blue eyes seemed to bring a beam from the sky on those she favored with
a look. Her dress, quite simple, with no exaggeration of fashion, had a
delightful middle-class modesty. Picture to yourself an old Satan as the
father of an angel, and purified in her divine presence, and you will
have an idea of Peyrade and his daughter. If anybody had soiled this
jewel, her father would have invented, to swallow him alive, one of
those dreadful plots in which, under the Restoration, the unhappy
wretches were trapped who were designate to die on the scaffold. A
thousand crowns were ample maintenance for Lydie and Katt, whom she
called nurse.

As Peyrade turned into the Rue des Moineaux, he saw Contenson; he
outstripped him, went upstairs before him, heard the man's steps on the
stairs, and admitted him before the woman had put her nose out of the
kitchen door. A bell rung by the opening of a glass door, on the third
story where the lapidary lived warned the residents on that and the
fourth floors when a visitor was coming to them. It need hardly be said
that, after midnight, Peyrade muffled this bell.

"What is up in such a hurry, Philosopher?"

Philosopher was the nickname bestowed on Contenson by Peyrade, and well
merited by the Epictetus among police agents. The name of Contenson,
alas! hid one of the most ancient names of feudal Normandy.

"Well, there is something like ten thousand francs to be netted."

"What is it? Political?"

"No, a piece of idiocy. Baron de Nucingen, you know, the old certified
swindler, is neighing after a woman he saw in the Bois de Vincennes,
and she has got to be found, or he will die of love.--The