chair upon the boards. He had risen, and he
was confronting his merry host very fiercely, white to the lips, his
eyes aflame. There was no mistaking his attitude, no mistaking his
words.

"Eh?" gasped the other, recovering himself at last to envisage what
appeared to develop into a serious situation.

"Monsieur," said Garnache, his voice very cold, "do I understand that
you no longer intend to carry out your engagement and wed Mademoiselle
de La Vauvraye?"

A dull flush spread upon the Marquis's face. He rose too, and across the
table he confronted his guest, his mien haughty, his eyes imperious.

"I thought, monsieur," said he, with a great dignity, "I thought when
I invited you to sit at my table that your business was to serve me,
however little I might be conscious of having merited the honour. It
seems instead that you are come hither to affront me. You are my guest,
monsieur. Let me beg that you will depart before I resent a question on
a matter which concerns myself alone."

The man was right, and Garnache was wrong. He had no title to take up
the affairs of Mademoiselle de La Vauvraye. But he was past reason now,
and he was not the man to brook haughtiness, however courteously it
might be cloaked. He eyed the Marquis's flushed ace across the board,
and his lip curled.

"Monsieur," said he, "I take your meaning very fully. Half a word with
me is as good as a whole sentence with another. You have dubbed me
in polite phrases an impertinent. That I am not; and I resent the
imputation."

"Oh, that!" said the Marquis, with a half-laugh and a shrug. "If you
resent it--" His smile and his gesture made the rest plain.

"Exactly, monsieur," was Garnache's answer. "But I do not fight sick
men."

Florimond's brows grew wrinkled, his eyes puzzled.

"Sick men!" he echoed. "Awhile ago, monsieur, you appeared to cast a
doubt upon my sanity. Is it a case of the drunkard who thinks all the
world drunk but himself?"

Garnache gazed at him. That doubt he had entertained grew now into
something like assurance.

"I know not whether it is the fever makes your tongue run so--" he
began, when the other broke in, a sudden light of understanding in his
eyes.

"You are at fault," he cried. "I have no fever."

"But then your letter to Condillac?" demanded Garnache, lost now in
utter amazement.

"What of it? I'll swear I never said I had a fever."

"I'll swear you did."

"You give me the lie, then?"

But Garnache w