ieties sent him hurrying from Marsac to Angouleme;
he would climb up the rocky staircases into the old city and walk into
his son's workshop to see how business went. There stood the presses
in their places; the one apprentice, in a paper cap, was cleaning the
ink-balls; there was a creaking of a press over the printing of some
trade circular, the old type was still unchanged, and in the dens at the
end of the room he saw his son and the foreman reading books, which the
"bear" took for proof-sheets. Then he would join David at dinner and go
back to Marsac, chewing the cud of uneasy reflection.

Avarice, like love, has the gift of second sight, instinctively guessing
at future contingencies, and hugging its presentiments. Sechard senior
living at a distance, far from the workshop and the machinery which
possessed such a fascination for him, reminding him, as it did, of days
when he was making his way, could _feel_ that there were disquieting
symptoms of inactivity in his son. The name of Cointet Brothers haunted
him like a dread; he saw Sechard & Son dropping into the second place.
In short, the old man scented misfortune in the wind.

His presentiments were too well founded; disaster was hovering over the
house of Sechard. But there is a tutelary deity for misers, and by a
chain of unforeseen circumstances that tutelary deity was so ordering
matters that the purchase-money of his extortionate bargain was to be
tumbled after all into the old toper's pouch.

Indifferent to the religious reaction brought about by the Restoration,
indifferent no less to the Liberal movement, David preserved a most
unlucky neutrality on the burning questions of the day. In those times
provincial men of business were bound to profess political opinions of
some sort if they meant to secure custom; they were forced to choose for
themselves between the patronage of the Liberals on the one hand or the
Royalists on the other. And Love, moreover, had come to David's heart,
and with his scientific preoccupation and finer nature he had not room
for the dogged greed of which our successful man of business is made; it
choked the keen money-getting instinct which would have led him to study
the differences between the Paris trade and the business of a provincial
printing-house. The shades of opinion so sharply defined in the country
are blurred and lost in the great currents of Parisian business life.
Cointet Brothers set themselves deliberately to ass