ee him. But the gentleman is invisible; keeps
himself under lock and key, guarded by a perfect cloud of servants
in livery."

Meantime, Mme. Favoral had approached her daughter.

"Your brother?" she asked in a whisper.

"He has not yet come home."

"Dear me!" sighed the poor mother: "at such a time he forsakes us,
and for whose sake?"

XXV

Mme. Favoral, usually so indulgent, was too severe this time; and
it was very unjustly that she accused her son. She forgot, and
what mother does not forget, that he was twenty-five years of age,
that he was a man, and that, outside of the family and of herself,
he must have his own interests and his passions, his affections and
his duties. Because he happened to leave the house for a few hours,
Maxence was surely not forsaking either his mother or his sister.
It was not without a severe internal struggle that he had made up
his mind to go out, and, as he was going down the steps,

"Poor mother," he thought. "I am sure I am making her very unhappy;
but how can I help it?"

This was the first time that he had been in the street since his
farther's disaster had been known; and the impression produced upon
him was painful in the extreme. Formerly, when he walked through
the Rue St. Gilles, that street where he was born, and where he used
to play as a boy, every one met him with a friendly nod or a familiar
smile. True he was then the son of a man rich and highly esteemed;
whereas this morning not a hand was extended, not a hat raised, on
his passage. People whispered among themselves, and pointed him
out with looks of hatred and irony. That was because he was now
the son of the dishonest cashier tracked by the police, of the man
whose crime brought disaster upon so many innocent parties.

Mortified and ashamed, Maxence was hurrying on, his head down, his
cheek burning, his throat parched, when, in front of a wine-shop,

"Halloo!" said a man; "that's the son. What cheek!"

And farther on, in front of the grocer's.

"I tell you what," said a woman in the midst of a group, "they still
have more than we have."

Then, for the first time, he understood with what crushing weight
his father's crime would weigh upon his whole life; and, whilst
going up the Rue Turenne:

"It's all over," he thought: "I can never get over it." And he
was thinking of changing his name, of emigrating to America, and
hiding himself in the deserts of the Far West, when, a little
farth