The hundred francs a month disappeared with incredible celerity.

Finding nothing one day, when he had only spent forty or fifty francs, he remarked for the first time: "My money must have got wings." The next month he paid more attention to his accounts; but add as he might, like Robert Macaire, sixteen and five are twenty-three, he could make nothing of them.

When, for the third time, he found a still more important discrepancy, he communicated the painful fact to Madame Descoings, who loved him, he knew, with that maternal, tender, confiding, credulous, enthusiastic love that he had never had from his own mother, good as she was,--a love as necessary to the early life of an artist as the care of the hen is to her unfledged chickens.

To her alone could he confide his horrible suspicions.

He was as sure of his friends as he was of himself; and the Descoings, he knew, would take nothing to put in her lottery.