right, though it is
possible we may pay him. Altogether a most excellent plan, my own
work----."

Madame interrupted him, thinking perhaps it was wise that he should not
be committed too far that he could not throw the blame on other
shoulders. She took advantage of a pause to examine the document with
apparent care.

"Yes, excellent, but let us see. Three, seven, twelve, fourteen,
twenty-three--here is some mistake. Let us go over it again. Yes,
here it is. This is not your accounting. The miserly Lombard would
cozen you of your honor if he could but sell it again. Here is an
error of near ten thousand livres; let me correct it for you."

And while he stared at her she deftly copied the correct amounts from
the slip she held concealed in her hand. She knew the figures were his
own, but gave no token.

"I doubt not you would have looked over it more carefully before you
signed it, and these matters would have been detected by your own eyes."

"Yes, yes," he replied nervously, reaching out his hand for the paper
lest she observe--what her quick eyes had at first seen--that the
contract already bore his signature and seal. She gave it him and he
replaced it carefully in his breast.

"I will give those careless secretaries a lesson they sorely need," and
in this disturbed condition of mind he blustered out of the apartment,
forgetting his usual gallantries, which Madame so diplomatically put
aside without giving too serious offense.

Jerome leaned against the window-facing, his unseeing eyes resting on
the park beyond the little garden at our feet. His brow lowered, not
as of a storm, but with the murkiness of a settled and dismal day.
Perchance his thoughts wandered with his childhood's sweetheart amid
the fertile vales of far away Anjou. Nothing was more distant from him
than the gilded furnishings, the frescoes, the marble Venus at his
elbow. Beside her table, alone, and abstracted as Jerome, the woman
toyed with a dainty fan; her impassive beauty, born of rigid training,
betrayed not the inner desolation. Her face was calm and serious
enough, the skin lay smooth and glowed with all those delicate tints
that women love.

Her quietude reminded me of the slumbering ocean, glassy and tranquil,
whose unmarred surface conveyed no hint of sunken ships beneath, of
cold dumb faces tossing in the brine, of death-abysses where wrecks
abandoned lie.

I slipped away without rousing a protest from Jerome, a