At last, one morning, _Le Petit Beaumontais_ announced that the revocation of 'the ignoble poisoner of Maillebois' was signed. On the previous day Marc had heard of a fresh visit which the Count de Sanglebœuf had paid to the Préfecture, and he ceased to hope; his ruin was about to be consummated. The evening proved a very trying one. Whenever he quitted his classroom, and his boys, with their smiling faces and their fair and their dark little pates, were no longer near to remind him of the good time coming, he sank into sadness, and only after a struggle recovered the courage which he needed for the morrow. And so that particular evening proved particularly bitter. He thought of his work, destined to be so brutally interrupted--of those dearly-loved boys, whom he had taught perhaps for the last time, and whom he would not be allowed to save. They would be taken from him, handed over to some deformer of intellect and character, and it was the wreck of his ministry that made his heart bleed. He went to bed in such a gloomy mood that Geneviève gently, silently, cast her arms about him, as she still did occasionally from an impulse of wifely affection. 'You are worried, are you not, my poor darling?' she whispered. He did not answer immediately. He knew that she shared his views less than ever, and he always avoided painful explanations in spite of his secret remorse at allowing her to drift away from him without attempting an effort to make her wholly his own. Indeed, if he himself had again ceased to call on her mother and grandmother, he lacked the courage to forbid her visits to that icy little house, though he well divined that their happiness was greatly endangered there. Each time that Geneviève returned from the Place des Capucins he felt that she belonged to him a little less than before. Recently, while the whole clerical pack was barking at his heels, he had learnt that the ladies had denied him on every side, blushing for their connection as if it were some unmerited shame that soiled their family. 'Why don't you answer me, dear?' Geneviève began again. 'Don't you think that I share your sorrow?' He felt touched, and, returning her embrace, replied: 'Yes, I am grieved. But it is about matters in which you do not feel as I do, and, as I don't wish to reproach you, what is the use of confiding them to you? Still I may say I fear that in a few days we shall be here no longer.' 'How is that?' 'Oh! I shall certainly be sent elsewhere if I am not dismissed altogether. It is all over ... and we shall have to go away, I know not whither.' She raised a cry of delight: 'Oh, my dear! so much the better! That is the best thing that can happen to us.'