way the pale ink before allowing them to disappear with
a gurgling hiccough at the bottom of the filthy sink.

There were love-letters and love-letters of all sorts, from the note of
the adventuress--"I saw you pass at the Bois yesterday, Monsieur le
Duc,"--to the aristocratic reproaches of the mistress before the last,
the wailing of the abandoned, and the page still fresh with recent
confidences. Monpavon was familiar with all these mysteries, gave a name
to each of them: "That's from Madame Moor"--"Ah! Madame d'Athis." A
confused mass of coronets and initials, passing whims and old habits,
sullied at that moment by being thrown together promiscuously, all
swallowed up in that ghastly place, by lamplight, with a noise as of an
intermittent deluge, going to oblivion by a shameful road. Suddenly
Jenkins paused in his work of destruction. Two letters on pearl-gray
satin paper trembled in his fingers.

"Who's that?" queried Monpavon, at sight of the unfamiliar hand and the
Irishman's nervous excitement. "Ah! doctor, if you mean to read
everything we shall never finish."

Jenkins, with burning cheeks, his two letters in his hand, was consumed
by a fierce longing to carry them away in order to gloat over them at
his leisure, to torture himself with delicious pain by reading them,
perhaps also to use that correspondence as a weapon against the
imprudent creature who had signed it. But the marquis's rigid demeanor
frightened him. How could he divert his attention, get rid of him? An
opportunity presented itself unsought. A tiny sheet, written in a
senile, tremulous hand, had found its way between those same letters,
and attracted the attention of the charlatan, who said with an artless
expression:

"Oho! here's something that doesn't look like a billet-doux. 'My dear
duke, help, I am drowning! The Cour des Comptes has stuck its nose into
my affairs again'--"

"What the devil's that you're reading?" exclaimed Monpavon abruptly,
snatching the letter from his hands. And in an instant, thanks to Mora's
negligence in allowing such private letters to lie around, the terrible
plight in which he would be left by his protector's death came to his
mind. In his grief he had not as yet thought of it. He said to himself
that, amid his preparations for leaving the world, the duke might very
well forget him; and, leaving Jenkins to finish alone the drowning of
Don Juan's casket, he returned hurriedly to the bedroom. As he was about
to