ming a
luscious sausage which was to have been part of my dinner today, and
finishing a half-bottle of my best Bordeaux.

He appeared wholly unconscious of his enormities, and when I taxed him
with his villainies and plied him with peremptory questions he met me
with a dogged silence and a sulky attitude which I have never seen
equalled in all my life. He flatly denied that he had ever walked the
streets of Paris with a dog under his arm, or that I had ever chased
him up the Rue Beaune. He denied ever having lodged in the Hotel des
Cadets, or been acquainted with its proprietress, or with a
red-polled, hunchback miscreant named Aristide Nicolet. He denied that
the coat and hat found in room No. 25 were his; in fact, he denied
everything, and with an impudence, Sir, which was past belief.

But he put the crown to his insolence when he finally demanded two
hundred francs from me: his share in the sum paid to me by Mme. de
Nole for the recovery of her dog. He demanded this, Sir, in the name
of justice and of equity, and even brandished our partnership contract
in my face.

I was so irate at his audacity, so disgusted that presently I felt
that I could not bear the sight of him any longer. I turned my back on
him and walked out of my own private room, leaving him there still
munching my sausage and drinking my Bordeaux.

I was going through the antechamber with a view to going out into the
street for a little fresh air when something in the aspect of the
chair-bedstead on which that abominable brute Theodore had apparently
spent the night attracted my attention. I turned over one of the
cushions, and with a cry of rage which I took no pains to suppress I
seized upon what I found lying beneath: a blue linen blouse, Sir, a
peaked cap, a ginger-coloured wig and beard!

The villain! The abominable mountebank! The wretch! The . . . I was
wellnigh choking with wrath.

With the damning pieces of conviction in my hand, I rushed back into
the inner room. Already my cry of indignation had aroused the vampire
from his orgy. He stood before me sheepish, grinning, and taunted me,
Sir--taunted me for my blindness in not recognizing him under the
disguise of the so-called Aristide Nicolet.

It was a disguise which he had kept by him in case of an emergency
when first he decided to start business as a dog thief. Carissimo had
been his first serious venture and but for my interference it would
have been a wholly successful one. He