us M. de Naquet; now he was to be
entrusted with the final negotiations which, though at a heavy cost,
would bring security and happiness once more in the sumptuous palace
of the Rue de Grammont.

Then it was that the first little hitch occurred. Mme. la
Marquise--whether prompted thereto by a faint breath of suspicion, or
merely by natural curiosity--altered her mind about the appointment.
She decided that M. le Marquis, having pledged the emeralds, should
bring the money to her, and she herself would go to the bureau of M.
Hector Ratichon in the Rue Daunou, there to meet M. de Naquet, whom
she had not seen for seven years, but who had once been very dear to
her, and herself fling in his face the five hundred thousand francs,
the price of his silence and of her peace of mind.

At once, as you perceive, the situation became delicate. To have
demurred, or uttered more than a casual word of objection, would in
the case of M. le Marquis have been highly impolitic. He felt that at
once, the moment he raised his voice in protest: and when Madame
declared herself determined he immediately gave up arguing the point.

The trouble was that we had so very little time wherein to formulate
new plans. Monsieur was to go the very next morning to the Mont de
Piete to negotiate the emeralds, and the interview with the fabulous
M. de Naquet was to take place a couple of hours later; and it was now
three o'clock in the afternoon.

As soon as M. de Firmin-Latour was able to leave his wife, he came
round to my office. He appeared completely at his wits' end, not
knowing what to do.

"If my wife," he said, "insists on a personal interview with de
Naquet, who does not exist, our entire scheme falls to the ground.
Nay, worse! for I shall be driven to concoct some impossible
explanation for the non-appearance of that worthy, and heaven only
knows if I shall succeed in wholly allaying my wife's suspicions.

"Ah!" he added with a sigh, "it is doubly hard to have seen fortune so
near one's reach and then to see it dashed away at one fell swoop by
the relentless hand of Fate."

Not one word, you observe, of gratitude to me or of recognition of the
subtle mind that had planned and devised the whole scheme.

But, Sir, it is at the hour of supreme crises like the present one
that Hector Ratichon's genius soars up to the empyrean. It became
great, Sir; nothing short of great; and even the marvellous schemes of
the Italian Macchiavelli paled