It was a stunning blow.  When she heard the accusation made against her daughter, Madame Chebe rose in indignation.  No one could ever make her believe such a thing.  Her poor Sidonie was the victim of an infamous slander.

M. Chebe, for his part, adopted a very lofty tone, with significant phrases and motions of the head, taking everything to himself as was his custom.  How could any one suppose that his child, a Chebe, the daughter of an honorable business man known for thirty years on the street, was capable of Nonsense!

Mademoiselle Planus insisted.  It was a painful thing to her to be considered a gossip, a hawker of unsavory stories.  But they had incontestable proofs.  It was no longer a secret to anybody.

“And even suppose it were true,” cried M. Chebe, furious at her persistence.  “Is it for us to worry about it?  Our daughter is married.  She lives a long way from her parents.  It is for her husband, who is much older than she, to advise and guide her.  Does he so much as think of doing it?”

Upon that the little man began to inveigh against his son-in-law, that cold-blooded Swiss, who passed his life in his office devising machines, refused to accompany his wife into society, and preferred his old-bachelor habits, his pipe and his brewery, to everything else.

You should have seen the air of aristocratic disdain with which M. Chebe pronounced the word “brewery!” And yet almost every evening he went there to meet Risler, and overwhelmed him with reproaches if he once failed to appear at the rendezvous.

Behind all this verbiage the merchant of the Rue du Mail—­“Commission-Exportation”—­had a very definite idea.  He wished to give up his shop, to retire from business, and for some time he had been thinking of going to see Sidonie, in order to interest her in his new schemes.  That was not the time, therefore, to make disagreeable scenes, to prate about paternal authority and conjugal honor.  As for Madame Chebe, being somewhat less confident than before of her daughter’s virtue, she took refuge in the most profound silence.  The poor woman wished that she were deaf and blind—­that she never had known Mademoiselle Planus.

Like all persons who have been very unhappy, she loved a benumbed existence with a semblance of tranquillity, and ignorance seemed to her preferable to everything.  As if life were not sad enough, good heavens!  And then, after all, Sidonie had always been a good girl; why should she not be a good woman?

Night was falling.  M. Chebe rose gravely to close the shutters of the shop and light a gas-jet which illumined the bare walls, the empty, polished shelves, and the whole extraordinary place, which reminded one strongly of the day following a failure.  With his lips closed disdainfully, in his determination to remain silent, he seemed to say to the old lady, “Night has come—­it is time for you to go home.”  And all the while they could hear Madame Chebe sobbing in the back room, as she went to and fro preparing supper.