ances conspired against his tottering loyalty. The peace
which Europe now enjoyed encouraged the circulation of discoveries
and scientific ideas acquired during the war by the learned of
various countries, who for nearly twenty years had been unable to hold
communication. Science was making great strides. Claes found that the
progress of chemistry had been directed, unknown to chemists themselves,
towards the object of his researches. Learned men devoted to the higher
sciences thought, as he did, that light, heat, electricity, galvanism,
magnetism were all different effects of the same cause, and that the
difference existing between substances hitherto considered simple must
be produced by varying proportions of an unknown principle. The fear
that some other chemist might effect the reduction of metals and
discover the constituent principle of electricity,--two achievements
which would lead to the solution of the chemical Absolute,--increased
what the people of Douai called a mania, and drove his desires to a
paroxysm conceivable to those who devote themselves to the sciences, or
who have ever known the tyranny of ideas.

Thus it happened that Balthazar was again carried away by a passion all
the more violent because it had lain dormant so long. Marguerite,
who watched every evidence of her father's state of mind, opened the
long-closed parlor. By living in it she recalled the painful memories
which her mother's death had caused, and succeeded for a time in
re-awaking her father's grief, and retarding his plunge into the gulf to
the depths of which he was, nevertheless, doomed to fall. She determined
to go into society and force Balthazar to share in its distractions.
Several good marriages were proposed to her, which occupied Claes's
mind, but to all of them she replied that she should not marry until
after she was twenty-five. But in spite of his daughter's efforts, in
spite of his remorseful struggles, Balthazar, at the beginning of the
winter, returned secretly to his researches. It was difficult, however,
to hide his operations from the inquisitive women in the kitchen; and
one morning Martha, while dressing Marguerite, said to her:--

"Mademoiselle, we are as good as lost. That monster of a Mulquinier--who
is a devil disguised, for I never saw him make the sign of the
cross--has gone back to the garret. There's monsieur on the high-road to
hell. Pray God he mayn't kill you as he killed my poor mistress."

"It is