I am interested in my part. In pathetic
roles I am always a success, when I have had time to prepare myself."

"I know you are. But this disinterestedness need not prevent you from
resuming your dissipations. You must gamble, bet, and lose more money
than you ever did before. You must increase your demands, and say that
you must have money at all costs. You need not account to me for any
money you can extort from her. All you get is your own to spend as you
please."

"You don't say so! If you mean that--"

"You will hurry up matters, I'll be bound."

"I can promise you, no time shall be wasted."

"Now listen to what you are to do, Raoul. Before the end of three
months, you must have exhausted the resources of these two women. You
must force from them every franc they can raise, so that they will be
wholly unable to procure money to supply your increasing demands. In
three months I must find them penniless, absolutely ruined, without even
a jewel left."

Raoul was startled at the passionate, vindictive tone of Louis's voice
as he uttered these last words.

"You must hate these women, if you are so determined to make them
miserable," he said.

"I hate them?" cried Louis. "Can't you see that I madly love Madeleine,
love her as only a man of my age can love? Is not her image ever in my
mind? Does not the very mention of her name fire my heart, and make me
tremble like a school-boy?"

"Your great devotion does not prevent you planning the destruction of
her present happiness."

"Necessity compels me to do so. Nothing but the most cruel deceptions
and the bitterest suffering would ever induce her to become my wife, to
take me as the lesser of two evils. The day on which you have led Mme.
Fauvel and her niece to the extreme edge of the precipice, pointed out
its dark depths, and convinced them that they are irretrievably lost, I
shall appear, and rescue them. I will play my part with such grandeur,
such lofty magnanimity, that Madeleine will be touched, will forget her
past enmity, and regard me with favorable eyes. When she finds that it
is her sweet self, and not her money, that I want, she will soften, and
in time yield to my entreaties. No true woman can be indifferent to a
grand passion. I don't pretend to say that she will love me at first;
but, if she will only consent to be mine, I ask for nothing more; time
will do much, even for a poor devil like myself."

Raoul was shocked at this cold-blooded perversi