u turned pale and glanced at me. 'Have you
read it, and do you understand it?' your eyes asked; while mine replied:
'Yes, but I shall be silent.'"

"And I shall be silent too," said Madame d'Argeles.

M. de Coralth took her hand and raised it to his lips. "I knew we should
understand each other," he remarked, gravely. "I am not bad at heart,
believe me; and if I had possessed money of my own, or a mother like
you----"

She averted her face, fearing perhaps that M. de Coralth might read
her opinion of him in her eyes; but after a short pause she exclaimed
beseechingly: "Now that I am your accomplice, let me entreat you to do
all you possibly can to prevent last night's affair from being noised
abroad."

"Impossible."

"If not for M. Ferailleur's sake, for the sake of his poor widowed
mother."

"Pascal must be put out of the way!"

"Why do you say that? Do you hate him so much then? What has he done to
you?"

"To me, personally? Nothing--I even feel actual sympathy for him."

Madame d'Argeles was confounded. "What!" she stammered; "it wasn't on
your own account that you did this?"

"Why, no."

She sprang to her feet, and quivering with scorn and indignation, cried:
"Ah! then the deed is even more infamous--even more cowardly!" But
alarmed by the threatening gleam in M. de Coralth's eyes, she went no
further.

"A truce to these disagreeable truths," said he, coldly. "If we
expressed our opinions of each other without reserve, in this world,
we should soon come to hard words. Do you think I acted for my own
pleasure? Suppose some one had seen me when I slipped the cards into the
pack. If that had happened, I should have been ruined."

"And you think that no one suspects you?"

"No one. I lost more than a hundred louis myself. If Pascal belonged to
our set, people might investigate the matter, perhaps; but to-morrow it
will be forgotten."

"And will he have no suspicions?"

"He will have no proofs to offer, in any case."

Madame d'Argeles seemed to resign herself to the inevitable. "I hope you
will, at least, tell me on whose behalf you acted," she remarked.

"Impossible," replied M. de Coralth. And, consulting his watch, he
added, "But I am forgetting myself; I am forgetting that that idiot of
a Rochecote is waiting for a sword-thrust. So go to sleep, my dear lady,
and--till we meet again."

She accompanied him so far as the landing. "It is quite certain that he
is hastening to the house of M. Fer