Fortinbras made no reply. Lives like his one must understand and pardon as Bigourdin had done. Nothing that he could say could mitigate the animosity of Clothilde which he had originally incurred by marrying her sister. She would be moved by no pleading that it was his wife’s extravagance and intemperance that had urged him to the mad tampering with other people’s money (money honestly repaid, but all the same diverted wrongly for a time) which had caused him to be struck off the roll of solicitors and to leave England a disgraced man. She would have retorted that had he not been addicted to _boissons alcooliques_, a term which in France always means fiery spirits, and had he not led the life of the theatre and the restaurant, Cécile would have been sober and thrifty like herself and Gaspard. And Fortinbras would have beat his breast saying “Mea culpa.” He might have pleaded the after years of ceaseless struggle. But to what end? As soon as his wife was laid beneath the ground, Clothilde would gather together her skirts and pass for ever out of his life. Bigourdin knew of his remorse, his home of unending horror, his efforts ever frustrated, the weight at his feet that not only prevented him from rising, but dragged him gradually down, down, down. But even Bigourdin, who had not been to Paris for ten years, had not appreciated till now the depths of poverty into which Fortinbras and his sister had sunk. His last visit to them had been painful. A drunken, dishevelled hostess, especially when she is your own sister, does not make for charm. But they lived in a reputable apartment at Auteuil, and there was a good carpet on the floor of the salon and chairs and tables such as are found in Christian dwellings, and on the mantelpiece stood the ormolu clock, and on the walls hung the pictures which had once adorned their home in London. How had they come down to this? He shivered, cold and ill at ease. “As you must be hungry after your long journey, Gaspard,” said Madame Robineau, “I should advise you to go out to a restaurant. The cuisine of the _femme de journée_ I do not recommend. For me, I must keep watch, and it being Friday I fast as usual.” Fortinbras made no pretence at hospitality. Had he been able to set forth a banquet, he felt that every morsel would have been turned into stone by the basilisk eyes of Clothilde. Both men rose simultaneously, glad to be free. They went out, took an omnibus haphazard and eventually entered a restaurant in the neighbourhood of the Tour Saint-Jacques. “_Mon vieux_ Daniel,” said Bigourdin, as soon as they were seated. “Tell me frankly, for I don’t understand. How comes it that you are in these dreadful straits?” Fortinbras smiled sadly. “One earns little by translating from French into English and still less by dispensing happiness to youth.” “But——” Bigourdin hesitated. “But you have had other resources—not much certainly, but still something.”