, that he but
needed convincing that this was Mademoiselle de La Vauvraye. This argued
that for the rest he was satisfied.

"There, monsieur, you are at fault," she cried, and she was smiling into
his grave eyes. "Because once I put that jest upon you, you imagine--"

"No, no," he broke in. "You misapprehend me. I do not say that this is
not Mademoiselle de La Vauvraye; I do not say that--"

He paused; he was at the end of his resources. He did not know how
to put the thing without giving offence, and it had been his
resolve--realizing the necessity for it--to conduct this matter with a
grave courtesy.

To feel that after having carried the affair so far with a for
him--commendable lightness of touch, he should be at a loss for a
delicate word to convey a harsh accusation began to anger him. And once
Garnache began to be angered, the rest followed quickly. It was just
that flaw in his character that had been the ruin of him, that had
blighted what otherwise might have been a brilliant career. Astute and
wily as a fox, brave as a lion, and active as a panther, gifted with
intelligence, insight and resource, he had carried a dozen enterprises
up to the very threshold of success, there to have ruined them all by
giving way to some sudden access of choler.

So was it now. His pause was but momentary. Yet in that moment, from
calm and freezing that he had been, he became ruffled and hot. The
change was visible in his heightened colour, in his flashing eyes, and
in his twitching mustachios. For just a second he sought to smother
his wrath; he had a glimmer of remembrance of the need for caution and
diplomacy in the darkness of anger that was descending over him. Then,
without further warning, he exploded.

His nervous, sinewy hand clenched itself and fell with a crash upon the
table, overturning a flagon and sending a lake of wine across the board,
to trickle over at a dozen points and form in puddles at the feet of
Valerie. Startled, they all watched him, mademoiselle the most startled
of the three.

"Madame," he thundered, "I have been receiving dancing-lessons at your
hands for long enough. It is time, I think, we did a little ordinary
walking, else shall we get no farther along the road I mean to go and
that is the road to Paris with mademoiselle for company."

"Monsieur, monsieur!" cried the startled Marquise, placing herself
intrepidly before him; and Marius trembled for her, for so wild did the
man seem that