e inn. If you see the little groom, ask him at what hour to-morrow
his master can receive the sub-prefect--in case you find the nine
pearls. Don't drink, don't gossip yourself, and come back quickly; and
as soon as you get back let me know it by coming to the door of the
salon."

"Yes, monsieur."

The Mulet inn, as we have already said, stands on the square, at the
opposite corner to the garden wall of the Marion estate on the other
side of the road leading to Brienne. Therefore the solution of the
problem could be rapid. Antonin Goulard returned to his place by Cecile
to await results.

"We talked so much about the stranger yesterday that I dreamed of him
all night," said Madame Mollot.

"Ha! ha! do you still dream of unknown heroes, fair lady?" said Vinet.

"You are very impertinent; if I chose I could make you dream of me," she
retorted. "So this morning when I rose--"

It may not be useless to say that Madame Mollot was considered a clever
woman in Arcis; that is, she expressed herself fluently and abused that
advantage. A Parisian, wandering by chance into these regions, like the
Unknown, would have thought her excessively garrulous.

"--I was, naturally, making my toilet, and as I looked mechanically
about me--"

"Through the window?" asked Antonin.

"Certainly; my dressing-room opens on the street. Now you know, of
course, that Poupart has put the stranger into one of the rooms exactly
opposite to mine--"

"One room, mamma!" interrupted Ernestine. "The count occupies three
rooms! The little groom, dressed all in black, is in the first. They
have made a salon of the next, and the Unknown sleeps in the third."

"Then he has half the rooms in the inn," remarked Mademoiselle Herbelot.

"Well, young ladies, and what has that to do with his person?" said
Madame Mollot, sharply, not pleased at the interruption. "I am talking
of the man himself--"

"Don't interrupt the orator," put in Vinet.

"As I was stooping--"

"Seated?" asked Antonin.

"Madame was of course as she naturally would be,--making her toilet and
looking at the Mulet," said Vinet.

In the provinces such jokes are prized, for people have so long said
everything to each other that they have recourse at last to the sort
of nonsense our fathers indulged in before the introduction of English
hypocrisy,--one of those products against which custom-houses are
powerless.

"Don't interrupt the orator," repeated Cecile Beauvisage to Vinet, wit