ion of her much admired country
house at Mousseaux-on-the-Loire, an ancient royal residence, long
neglected, which he succeeded in restoring with a skill and ingenuity
really amazing in an undistinguished scholar of the Beaux-Arts.
Mousseaux got him the order for the new mansion of the Ambassador of the
Porte; and finally the Princess of Rosen commissioned him to design the
mausoleum of Prince Herbert of Rosen, who had come to a tragic end
in the expedition of Christian of Illyria. The young man now thought
himself sure of success. Astier the elder was induced by his wife to put
down three thousand pounds out of his savings for the purchase of a site
in the Rue Fortuny. Then Paul built himself a mansion--or rather, a wing
to a mansion, which was itself arranged as a block of elegant 'rooms
to let.' He was a practical young fellow, and if he wanted a mansion,
without which no artist is _chic_, he meant it to bring him an income.

Unfortunately houses to let are not always so easy to let, and the young
architect's way of life, with two horses in his stable (one for harness,
one for the saddle), his club, his visiting, his slow reimbursements,
made it impossible for him to wait. Moreover, the elder Astier suddenly
declared that he was not going to give any more; and all that the
mother could attempt or say for her darling son failed to shake
this irrevocable decision. Her will, which had hitherto swayed the
establishment, was now resisted. Thenceforward there was a continual
struggle. The mother used her ingenuity to make little dishonest profits
on the household expenses, that she might never have to say 'no' to her
son's requests. Leonard suspected her and, to protect himself, checked
the accounts. In these humiliating conflicts the wife, who was the
better bred, was the first to tire; and nothing less than the desperate
situation of her beloved Paul would have induced her to make a fresh
attempt.

She went slowly into the dining room. It was a long, melancholy room,
ill lighted by tall, narrow windows, having in fact been used as a
_table d'hote_ for ecclesiastics until the Astiers took it. There she
found her husband already at table, looking preoccupied and almost
grumpy. In the ordinary way '_the Master_' came to his meals with a
smiling serenity as regular as his appetite, and with teeth which, sound
as a foxhound's, were not to be discouraged by stale bread or leathery
meat, or by the miscellaneous disagreeables w