w, since you've been kind enough
to help her. Thank you for her and for us."

Madame Theodore and Celine likewise poured forth their thanks, standing
beside Madame Toussaint in the everlasting mud of that populous district,
amidst the jostling of the passers-by. And lingering there as if to see
Pierre enter, they again chatted together and repeated that, after all,
some priests were very kind.

The Grandidier works covered an extensive plot of ground. Facing the
street there was only a brick building with narrow windows and a great
archway, through which one espied a long courtyard. But, in the rear,
came a suite of habitations, workshops, and sheds, above whose never
ending roofs arose the two lofty chimneys of the generators. From the
very threshold one detected the rumbling and quivering of machinery, all
the noise and bustle of work. Black water flowed by at one's feet, and up
above white vapour spurted from a slender pipe with a regular strident
puff, as if it were the very breath of that huge, toiling hive.

Bicycles were now the principal output of the works. When Grandidier had
taken them on leaving the Dijon Arts and Trades School, they were
declining under bad management, slowly building some little motive
engines by the aid of antiquated machinery. Foreseeing the future,
however, he had induced his elder brother, one of the managers of the Bon
Marche, to finance him, on the promise that he would supply that great
emporium with excellent bicycles at 150 francs apiece. And now quite a
big venture was in progress, for the Bon Marche was already bringing out
the new popular machine "La Lisette," the "Bicycle for the Multitude," as
the advertisements asserted. Nevertheless, Grandidier was still in all
the throes of a great struggle, for his new machinery had cast a heavy
burden of debt on him. At the same time each month brought its effort,
the perfecting or simplifying of some part of the manufacture, which
meant a saving in the future. He was ever on the watch; and even now was
thinking of reverting to the construction of little motors, for he
thought he could divine in the near future the triumph of the motor-car.

On asking if M. Thomas Froment were there, Pierre was led by an old
workman to a little shed, where he found the young fellow in the linen
jacket of a mechanician, his hands black with filings. He was adjusting
some piece of mechanism, and nobody would have suspected him to be a
former pupil of th