elation, his throat felt saltier than the sea.

"And you, who talked to him about his wife's lovers and his skin
diseases!" said Mistigris, turning on Oscar.

"What does he mean?" exclaimed the steward's wife, gazing after the two
artists, who went away laughing at the expression of Oscar's face.

Oscar remained dumb, confounded, stupefied, hearing nothing, though
Madame Moreau questioned him and shook him violently by his arm, which
she caught and squeezed. She gained nothing, however, and was forced to
leave him in the salon without an answer, for Rosalie appeared again, to
ask for linen and silver, and to beg she would go herself and see that
the multiplied orders of the count were executed. All the household,
together with the gardeners and the concierge and his wife, were going
and coming in a confusion that may readily be imagined. The master had
fallen upon his own house like a bombshell.

From the top of the hill near La Cave, where he left the coach, the
count had gone, by the path through the woods well-known to him, to
the house of his gamekeeper. The keeper was amazed when he saw his real
master.

"Is Moreau here?" said the count. "I see his horse."

"No, monseigneur; he means to go to Moulineaux before dinner, and he has
left his horse here while he went to the chateau to give a few orders."

"If you value your place," said the count, "you will take that horse and
ride at once to Beaumont, where you will deliver to Monsieur Margueron
the note that I shall now write."

So saying the count entered the keeper's lodge and wrote a line, folding
it in a way impossible to open without detection, and gave it to the man
as soon as he saw him in the saddle.

"Not a word to any one," he said, "and as for you, madame," he added
to the gamekeeper's wife, "if Moreau comes back for his horse, tell him
merely that I have taken it."

The count then crossed the park and entered the court-yard of the
chateau through the iron gates. However worn-out a man may be by the
wear and tear of public life, by his own emotions, by his own mistakes
and disappointments, the soul of any man able to love deeply at the
count's age is still young and sensitive to treachery. Monsieur de
Serizy had felt such pain at the thought that Moreau had deceived him,
that even after hearing the conversation at Saint-Brice he thought
him less an accomplice of Leger and the notary than their tool. On the
threshold of the inn, and while that con