The cashier did not finish his sentence; but his silence was pregnant with unspoken thoughts.

The old maid was appalled; but, like most women under such circumstances, instead of seeking a remedy for the evil, she wandered off into a maze of regrets, conjectures, and retrospective lamentations.  What a misfortune that they had not known it sooner when they had the Chebes for neighbors.  Madame Chebe was such an honorable woman.  They might have put the matter before her so that she would keep an eye on Sidonie and talk seriously to her.

“Indeed, that’s a good idea,” Sigismond interrupted.  “You must go to the Rue du Mail and tell her parents.  I thought at first of writing to little Frantz.  He always had a great deal of influence over his brother, and he’s the only person on earth who could say certain things to him.  But Frantz is so far away.  And then it would be such a terrible thing to do.  I can’t help pitying that unlucky Risler, though.  No! the best way is to tell Madame Chebe.  Will you undertake to do it, sister?”

It was a dangerous commission.  Mademoiselle Planus made some objections, but she never had been able to resist her brother’s wishes, and the desire to be of service to their old friend Risler assisted materially in persuading her.

Thanks to his son-in-law’s kindness, M. Chebe had succeeded in gratifying his latest whim.  For three months past he had been living at his famous warehouse on the Rue du Mail, and a great sensation was created in the quarter by that shop without merchandise, the shutters of which were taken down in the morning and put up again at night, as in wholesale houses.  Shelves had been placed all around the walls, there was a new counter, a safe, a huge pair of scales.  In a word, M. Chebe possessed all the requisites of a business of some sort, but did not know as yet just what business he would choose.

He pondered the subject all day as he walked to and fro across the shop, encumbered with several large pieces of bedroom furniture which they had been unable to get into the back room; he pondered it, too, as he stood on his doorstep, with his pen behind his ear, and feasted his eyes delightedly on the hurly-burly of Parisian commerce.  The clerks who passed with their packages of samples under their arms, the vans of the express companies, the omnibuses, the porters, the wheelbarrows, the great bales of merchandise at the neighboring doors, the packages of rich stuffs and trimmings which were dragged in the mud before being consigned to those underground regions, those dark holes stuffed with treasures, where the fortune of business lies in embryo—­all these things delighted M. Chebe.

He amused himself guessing at the contents of the bales and was first at the fray when some passer-by received a heavy package upon his feet, or the horses attached to a dray, spirited and restive, made the long vehicle standing across the street an obstacle to circulation.  He had, moreover, the thousand-and-one distractions of the petty tradesman without customers, the heavy showers, the accidents, the thefts, the disputes.