"No, excepting our customers or their employees. But as I am well aware that the Barbets are bold and wily enough to put on the disguise of honest merchants, whenever occasion demands it, in order to gain access to a house and steal, and that they might play that trick upon me under the pretext of bringing an order for some embroidery, neither Hena nor I ever leave the room when a stranger is with us."
"I am ransacking my mind for the intimate acquaintance who could have entered the room," the printer proceeded as if communing with himself with painful anxiety. "Occasionally, Lefevre spends an evening with us; I have come up into this room with him several times when he requested me to read some of our family legends to him."
"But, my friend, it is a long time since we have seen Lefevre; you yourself were wondering the other day what may have become of him; moreover, it is out of all question to suspect your friend, a man of austere morals, always wrapt in science."
"God prevent my suspecting him! I was only going over the extremely small number of persons who visit us familiarly."
"Then there is my brother. The fellow is, true enough, a soldier of adventure; he has his faults, grave faults, but—"
"Ah, Bridget, Josephin has for you and our children so tender a love, so touching—I hold him capable of doing almost anything in a hostile country, as is customary with people of his vocation; but he, who almost every day sits at our hearth—he, commit a theft in our house? Such a thought never crossed my mind—and never will!"
"Oh, I thank you for these words! I thank you!"
"And did you suppose that I suspected your brother? No! A thousand times, no!"
"What shall I say? The vagabond life that he has led since his early youth—the habits of violence and rapine with which the 'Franc-Taupins,' the 'Pendards,' and the other soldiers of adventure who are my brother's habitual companions are so justly reproached, might have caused suspicion to rise in some prejudiced mind, and—but my God—Christian—what ails you, tell me what ails you?" cried Bridget, seeing her husband hide his face between his hands in utter despair, and then suddenly rise and pace the room, as if pursued by a thought from which he sought to flee. "My friend," insisted Bridget, "what sudden thought has struck and afflicts you? There are tears in your eyes. Your face is strangely distorted. Answer me, I pray you!"
"I take heaven to witness," cried the artisan, raising his hands heavenward with a face that betrayed the tortures of his heart, "the loss of the twenty gold crowns, that we gathered so laboriously, is a serious matter to me; it was our daughter's dower; but that loss is as nothing beside—"