will have news to communicate to her."

You will admit that I carried off the situation in a becoming manner.
Both Mademoiselle and Arthur Geoffroy gave me a few more details in
connexion with the affair. To these details I listened with well
simulated interest. Of course, they did not know that there were no
details in connexion with this affair that I did not know already. My
heart was actually dancing within my bosom. The future was so
entrancing that the present appeared like a dream; the lovely being
before me seemed like an angel, an emissary from above come to tell me
of the happiness which was in store for me. The house near
Chantilly--the little widow--the kitchen garden--the magic words went
on hammering in my brain. I longed now to be rid of my visitors, to be
alone once more, so as to think out the epilogue of this glorious
adventure. Ten thousand francs was the reward offered me by this
adorable creature! Well, then, why should not M. Charles Saurez, on
his side, pay me another ten thousand for the same document, which was
absolutely undistinguishable from the first?

Ten thousand, instead of two hundred which he had the audacity to
offer me!

Seven o'clock had struck before I finally bowed my clients out of the
room. Theodore had gone. The lazy lout would never stay as much as
five minutes after his appointed time, so I had to show the adorable
creature and her fat brother out of the premises myself. But I did not
mind that. I flatter myself that I can always carry off an awkward
situation in a dignified manner. A brief allusion to the inefficiency
of present-day servants, a jocose comment on my own simplicity of
habits, and the deed was done. M. Arthur Geoffroy and Mademoiselle
Madeleine his sister were half-way down the stairs. A quarter of an
hour later I was once more out in the streets of Paris. It was a
beautiful, balmy night. I had two hundred francs in my pocket and
there was a magnificent prospect of twenty thousand francs before me!
I could afford some slight extravagance. I had dinner at one of the
fashionable restaurants on the quay, and I remained some time out on
the terrace sipping my coffee and liqueur, dreaming dreams such as I
had never dreamed before. At ten o'clock I was once more on my way to
Passy.

5.

When I turned the corner of the street and came is sight of the
squalid house where I lodged, I felt like a being from another world.
Twenty thousand francs--a fortune!--was