"Oh, none."
"Then what makes you uneasy about Louise?"
The lapidary impatiently interrupted his wife by saying:
"Because I have noticed for the last three months that, whenever Louise comes to see us, she seems embarrassed, and even confused. When I take her in my arms and embrace her, as I have been used to do from her birth, she blushes."
"Ah, that is with delight at seeing you, or from shame."
"She seems sadder and more dejected, too, each visit she pays us."
"Because she finds our misery constantly increasing. Besides, when I spoke to her concerning the notary, she told me he had quite ceased his threats of putting you in prison."
"But did she tell you the price she has paid to induce him to lay aside his threats? She did not tell you that, I dare say, did she? Ah, a father's eye is not to be deceived; and her blushes and embarrassments, when giving me her usual kiss, make me dread I know not what. Why, would it not be an atrocious thing to say to a poor girl, whose bread depended on her employer's word, 'Either sacrifice your virtuous principles, and become what I would have you, or quit my house? And if any one should inquire of me respecting the character you have with me, I shall speak of you in such terms that no one will take you into their service.' Well, then, how much worse is it to frighten a fond and affectionate child into surrendering her innocence, by threatening to put her father into prison if she refused, when the brute knows that upon the labour of that father a whole family depends? Surely the earth contains nothing more infamous, more fiendlike, than such conduct."
"Ah," replied Madeleine, "and then only to think that with the value of one, only one of those diamonds now lying on your table, we might pay the notary all we owe him, and so take Louise out of his power and keep her at home with us. Don't you see, husband?"
"What is the use of your repeating the same thing over and over again? You might just as well tell me that if I were rich I should not be poor," answered Morel, with sorrowful impatience. For such was the innate and almost constitutional honesty of this man, that it never once occurred to him that his weak-minded partner, bowed down and irritated by long suffering and want, could ever have conceived the idea of tempting him to a dishonourable appropriation of that which belonged to another.