Eve meanwhile went out on the tolerably ingenious pretext of asking advise of Postel, sat awhile enduring the insulting pity that spends itself in words, left the Postel family, and stole away unseen to Basine Clerget, told her troubles, and asked for help and shelter. Basine, for greater safety, had brought Eve into her bedroom, and now she opened the door of a little closet, lighted only by a skylight in such a way that prying eyes could not see into it. The two friends unstopped the flue which opened into the chimney of the stove in the workroom, where the girls heated their irons. Eve and Basine spread ragged coverlets over the brick floor to deaden any sound that David might make, put in a truckle bed, a stove for his experiments, and a table and a chair. Basine promised to bring food in the night; and as no one had occasion to enter her room, David might defy his enemies one and all, or even detectives. “At last!” Eve said, with her arms about her friend, “at last he is in safety.” Eve went back to Postel to submit a fresh doubt that had occurred to her, she said. She would like the opinion of such an experienced member of the Chamber of Commerce; she so managed that he escorted her home, and listened patiently to his commiseration. “Would this have happened if you had married me?”--all the little druggist’s remarks were pitched in this key. Then he went home again to find Mme. Postel jealous of Mme. Séchard, and furious with her spouse for his polite attention to that beautiful woman. The apothecary advanced the opinion that little red-haired women were preferable to tall, dark women, who, like fine horses, were always in the stable, he said. He gave proofs of his sincerity, no doubt, for Mme. Postel was very sweet to him next day. “We may be easy,” Eve said to her mother and Marion, whom she found still “in a taking,” in the latter’s phrase. “Oh! they are gone,” said Marion, when Eve looked unthinkingly round the room. One league out of Angoulême on the main road to Paris, Kolb stopped. “Vere shall we go?” “To Marsac,” said David; “since we are on the way already, I will try once more to soften my father’s heart.” “I would rader mount to der assault of a pattery,” said Kolb, “your resbected fader haf no heart whatefer.” The ex-pressman had no belief in his son; he judged him from the outside point of view, and waited for results. He had no idea, to begin with, that he had plundered David, nor did he make allowance for the very different circumstances under which they had begun life; he said to himself, “I set him up with a printing-house, just as I found it myself; and he, knowing a thousand times more than I did, cannot keep it going.” He was mentally incapable of understanding his son; he laid the blame of failure upon him, and even prided himself, as it were, on his superiority to a far greater intellect than his own, with the thought, “I am securing his bread for him.”