to set you to rights! I will now take my leave; but first let me
give you an acknowledgment for the money I have received."

While the priest was writing the receipt, a look wholly impossible to
describe passed between Jacques Ferrand and Polidori.

"Come, come," said the priest, as he handed the paper he had written to
Jacques Ferrand, "be of good cheer! Depend upon it, it will be long ere
so faithful and devout a servant is suffered to quit a life so usefully
and religiously employed. I will come again to-morrow, and inquire how
you are. Adieu, monsieur! Farewell, my good, my holy, and excellent
friend!"

And with these words the priest quitted the apartment, leaving Jacques
Ferrand and Polidori alone there. No sooner was the door closed than a
fearful imprecation burst from the lips of Jacques Ferrand, whose rage
and despair, so long and forcibly repressed, now broke forth with
redoubled fury. Breathless and excited, he continued, with wild and
haggard looks, to pace to and fro like a furious tiger going the length
of his chain, and then again retracing his infuriated march; while
Polidori, preserving the most imperturbable look and manner, gazed on
him with insulting calmness.

"Damnation!" exclaimed Jacques Ferrand, at last, in a voice of
concentrated wrath and violence; "the idea of my fortune being thus
swallowed up in founding these humbugging philanthropic institutions,
and to be obliged to give away my riches in such absurdities as building
banks for other people! Your master must be the fiend himself to torture
a man as he is doing me!"

"I have no master," replied Polidori, coldly; "only, like yourself, I
have a judge whose decrees there is no escaping!"

"But thus blindly and idiotically to follow the most trifling order of
this man!" continued Jacques Ferrand, with redoubled rage. "To compel
me, constrain me, to the very actions most galling and hateful to me!"

"Nay, you have your chance between obedience and the scaffold!"

"And to think that there should be no way to escape this accursed
domination! To be obliged to part with such a sum as that I lately
handed over to that old proser,--a million sterling! The very extent of
all my earthly possessions are now this house and about one hundred
thousand francs. What more can he want with me?"

"Oh, but you have not done yet! The prince has learned, through Badinot,
that your man of straw, 'Petit Jean,' was only your own assumed title,
under which