"

"He not only considers it settled, but he is trying now to make people
believe it is a love-match. He rattled off a perfect tirade to convince
me that he is really in love."

"Very well," said du Portail, wishing, perhaps, to show that he could,
on occasion, use the slang of a low billiard-room, "'stop the charge'"
(meaning: Do nothing more); "I will undertake to bring monsieur to
reason. But come and see me to-morrow, and tell me all about the family
he intends to enter. You have failed in this affair; but don't mind
that; I shall have others for you."

So saying, he signed to the driver of an empty citadine, which was
passing, got into it, and, with a nod to Cerizet, told the man to drive
to the rue Honore-Chevalier.

As Cerizet walked down the rue Montmartre to regain the Estrapade
quarter, he puzzled his brains to divine who that little old man with
the curt speech, the imperious manner, and a tone that seemed to cast
upon all those with whom he spoke a boarding-grapnel, could be; a man,
too, who came from such a distance to spend his evening in a place
where, judging by his clothes alone, he had no business to be.

Cerizet had reached the Market without finding any solution to that
problem, when he was roughly shaken out of it by a heavy blow in the
back. Turning hastily, he found himself in presence of Madame Cardinal,
an encounter with whom, at a spot where she came every morning to get
fish to peddle, was certainly not surprising.

Since that evening in Toupillier's garret, the worthy woman, in spite of
the clemency so promptly shown to her, had judged it imprudent to make
other than very short apparitions in her own domicile, and for the
last two days she had been drowning among the liquor-dealers (called
"retailers of comfort") the pangs of her defeat. With flaming face and
thickened voice she now addressed her late accomplice:--

"Well, papa," she said, "what happened after I left you with that little
old fellow?"

"I made him understand in a very few words," replied the banker of
the poor, "that it was all a mistake as to me. In this affair, my dear
Madame Cardinal, you behaved with a really unpardonable heedlessness.
How came you to ask my assistance in obtaining your inheritance from
your uncle, when with proper inquiry you might have known there was a
natural daughter, in whose favor he had long declared he should make a
will? That little old man, who interrupted you in your foolish attempt
t