“Ah! do not doubt it,” she stammered out.  “Of his own inspiration, Vincent could never have committed an evil act.  He has been circumvented, led away, duped!”

“Very well; but by whom?”

“By Costeclar,” affirmed Mlle. Gilberte.

“By the Messrs. Jottras, the bankers,” said Mme. Favoral, “and also by M. Saint Pavin, the editor of ‘the Financial Pilot.’”

“By all of them, evidently,” interrupted Maxence, “even by his manager, M. de Thaller.”

When a man is at the bottom of a precipice, what is the use of finding out how he has got there,—­whether by stumbling over a stone, or slipping on a tuft of grass!  And yet it is always our foremost thought.  It was with an eager obstinacy that Mme. Favoral and her children ascended the course of their existence, seeking in the past the incidents and the merest words which might throw some light upon their disaster; for it was quite manifest that it was not in one day and at the same time that twelve millions had been subtracted from the Mutual Credit.  This enormous deficit must have been, as usual, made gradually, with infinite caution at first, whilst there was a desire, and some hope, to make it good again, then with mad recklessness towards the end when the catastrophe had become inevitable.

“Alas!” murmured Mme. Favoral, “why did not Vincent listen to my presentiments on that ever fatal day when he brought M. de Thaller, M. Jottras, and M. Saint Pavin to dine here?  They promised him a fortune.”

Maxence and Mlle. Gilberte were too young at the time of that dinner to have preserved any remembrance of it; but they remembered many other circumstances, which, at the time they had taken place, had not struck them.  They understood now the temper of their father, his perpetual irritation, and the spasms of his humor.  When his friends were heaping insults upon him, he had exclaimed,

“Be it so! let them arrest me; and to-night, for the first time in many years, I shall sleep in peace.”

There were years, then, that he lived, as it were upon burning coals, trembling at the fear of discovery, and wondering, as he went to sleep each night, whether he would not be awakened by the rude hand of the police tapping him on the shoulder.  No one better than Mme. Favoral could affirm it.

“Your father, my children,” she said, “had long since lost his sleep.  There was hardly ever a night that he did not get up and walk the room for hours.”

They understood, now, his efforts to compel Mlle. Gilberte to marry M. Costeclar.

“He thought that Costeclar would help him out of the scrape,” suggested Maxence to his sister.

The poor girl shuddered at the thought, and she could not help feeling thankful to her father for not having told her his situation; for would she have had the sublime courage to refuse the sacrifice, if her father had told her?