at last.  Others are busy making the same researches, and if I am first in the field, we shall have a large fortune.  I have said nothing to Lucien, his enthusiastic nature would spoil everything; he would convert my hopes into realities, and begin to live like a lord, and perhaps get into debt.  So keep my secret for me.  Your sweet and dear companionship will be consolation in itself during the long time of experiment, and the desire to gain wealth for you and Lucien will give me persistence and tenacity——­”

“I had guessed this too,” Eve said, interrupting him; “I knew that you were one of those inventors, like my poor father, who must have a woman to take care of them.”

“Then you love me!  Ah! say so without fear to me, who saw a symbol of my love for you in your name.  Eve was the one woman in the world; if it was true in the outward world for Adam, it is true again in the inner world of my heart for me.  My God! do you love me?”

“Yes,” said she, lengthening out the word as if to make it cover the extent of feeling expressed by a single syllable.

“Well, let us sit here,” he said, and taking Eve’s hand, he went to a great baulk of timber lying below the wheels of a paper-mill.  “Let me breathe the evening air, and hear the frogs croak, and watch the moonlight quivering upon the river; let me take all this world about us into my soul, for it seems to me that my happiness is written large over it all; I am seeing it for the first time in all its splendor, lighted up by love, grown fair through you.  Eve, dearest, this is the first moment of pure and unmixed joy that fate has given to me!  I do not think that Lucien can be as happy as I am.”

David felt Eve’s hand, damp and quivering in his own, and a tear fell upon it.

“May I not know the secret?” she pleaded coaxingly.

“You have a right to know it, for your father was interested in the matter, and to-day it is a pressing question, and for this reason.  Since the downfall of the Empire, calico has come more and more into use, because it is so much cheaper than linen.  At the present moment, paper is made of a mixture of hemp and linen rags, but the raw material is dear, and the expense naturally retards the great advance which the French press is bound to make.  Now you cannot increase the output of linen rags, a given population gives a pretty constant result, and it only increases with the birth-rate.  To make any perceptible difference in the population for this purpose, it would take a quarter of a century and a great revolution in habits of life, trade, and agriculture.  And if the supply of linen rags is not enough to meet one-half nor one-third of the demand, some cheaper material than linen rags must be found for cheap paper.  This deduction is based on facts that came under my knowledge here.  The Angouleme paper-makers, the last to use pure linen rags, say that the proportion of cotton in the pulp has increased to a frightful extent of late years.”