“No, he came here about some business, to get some information; then he dared to speak to me of love; and flying into a rage at my contempt, he was about to proceed to the last extremity, when you arrived.” “The monster! Ah! if I find him----” “Pardi! what a miserable scamp! To think of falling in love with a sweet, pretty woman like Madame Murville! I wouldn’t let him touch the end of my finger!” “He had better not think of touching anything of yours, or of looking at madame,” said Sans-Souci; “or by the battle of Austerlitz, the hilt of my sword will serve him for a watch chain.” Tranquillity was restored; but Adeline, sorely distressed by the loss of her mother, and by what the treacherous Dufresne had told her of Edouard, refused to go to Guillot’s party, to the great disappointment of the people at the farm. In vain did Louise and her companions try to shake her resolution; they could obtain no promise; they had to return, sadly enough, without Madame Murville, and to leave her a prey to the sorrow with which she seemed overwhelmed. Jacques and Sans-Souci offered to pass the night in the house, in order to defend her against any new enterprises on the part of the villain who had escaped them; but Adeline would not consent; she thanked them, assuring them that she had nothing more to fear; but urged them to come often to see her. The people from the farm took their leave regretfully, and Jacques registered an inward vow to watch over his brother’s wife. XXV THE LOTTERY OFFICE “How does it happen that I am ruined, while I see other men win all the time? Shall I never be able to find a way to grow rich rapidly?” Thus did Edouard commune with himself on the day of Dufresne’s departure for Villeneuve-Saint-Georges. He came out of an academy--a decent method of designating a gambling hell,--where he had lost a large part of the sum he had borrowed on his house. He strode angrily along the streets of Paris; he dreamed of cards, of martingales, of series, of _parolis_, and of all those unlucky combinations which constantly perturb the brain of a gambler. A noisy burst of music, the booming of a bass drum, the strains of two clarinets and a pair of cymbals, roused him from his reverie; he raised his eyes with the intention of walking away from the musicians, whose uproar tired him, and saw that he was in front of a lottery office. The music which he heard was produced by one of those travelling bands which, for a forty-sou piece given them by the keeper of the office, raise an infernal tumult before the door and attract all the gossips of the neighborhood to the “lucky office” where the list of _ambes_, _ternes_, and even _quaternes_, said to have been won, is hung at the door with an exact statement of the result of the lottery; the whole embellished with pink and blue ribbons like the sweetmeats in a confectioner’s window.