r."

"He will be, _per Bacco_! I answer for it," said the governor in a
piercing voice; and in the transport of admiration, not knowing how to
express his enthusiasm, he seized the fat, hairy hand of the Nabob and
on an unreflective impulse raised it to his lips. They are demonstrative
in his country. Everybody was standing up; no one sat down again.

Jansoulet, beaming, had risen in his turn, and, throwing down his
serviette: "Let us go and have some coffee," he said.

A glad tumult immediately spread through the salons, vast apartments in
which light, decoration, sumptuousness, were represented by gold alone.
It seemed to fall from the ceiling in blinding rays, it oozed from
the walls in mouldings, sashes, framings of every kind. A little of it
remained on your hands if you moved a piece of furniture or opened a
window; and the very hangings, dipped in this Pactolus, kept on their
straight folds the rigidity, the sparkle of a metal. But nothing bearing
the least personal stamp, nothing intimate, nothing thought out. The
monotonous luxury of the furnished flat. And there was a re-enforcement
of this impression of a moving camp, of a merely provisory home, in the
suggestion of travel which hovered like an uncertainty or a menace over
this fortune derived from far-off sources.

Coffee having been served, in the Eastern manner, with all its grounds,
in little cups filigreed with silver, the guests grouped themselves
round, making haste to drink, scalding themselves, keeping watchful eyes
on each other and especially on the Nabob as they looked out for the
favourable moment to spring upon him, draw him into some corner of those
immense rooms, and at length negotiate their loan. For this it was that
they had been awaiting for two hours; this was the object of their visit
and the fixed idea which gave them during the meal that absent, falsely
attentive manner. But here no more constraint, no more pretence. In that
peculiar social world of theirs it is of common knowledge that in the
Nabob's busy life the hour of coffee remains the only time free for
private audiences, and each desiring to profit by it, all having come
there in order to snatch a handful of wool from the golden fleece
offered them with so much good nature, people no longer talk, they no
longer listen, every man is absorbed in his own errand of business.

It is the good Jenkins who begins. Having drawn his friend Jansoulet
aside into a recess, he submits to