e second bottle, he was more tipsy than a
cork; so much so, that he lost nearly everything he had with him: his
overcoat, purse, umbrella, cigar-case--"

Old Tabaret couldn't sit and listen any longer; he jumped to his feet
like a raving madman.

"Miserable wretch!" he cried, "infamous scoundrel! It is he; but I have
him!"

And he rushed out, leaving Juliette so terrified that she called her
maid.

"Child," said she, "I have just made some awful blunder, have let some
secret out. I am sure that something dreadful is going to happen; I feel
it. That old rogue was no friend of Noel's, he came to circumvent me,
to lead me by the nose; and he succeeded. Without knowing it I must have
spoken against Noel. What can I have said? I have thought carefully, and
can remember nothing; but he must be warned though. I will write him a
line, while you find a messenger to take it."

Old Tabaret was soon in his cab and hurrying towards the Prefecture of
Police. Noel an assassin! His hate was without bounds, as formerly had
been his confiding affection. He had been cruelly deceived, unworthily
duped, by the vilest and the most criminal of men. He thirsted for
vengeance; he asked himself what punishment would be great enough for
the crime.

"For he not only assassinated Claudine," thought he, "but he so arranged
the whole thing as to have an innocent man accused and condemned. And
who can say that he did not kill his poor mother?"

He regretted the abolition of torture, the refined cruelty of the middle
ages: quartering, the stake, the wheel. The guillotine acts so quickly
that the condemned man has scarcely time to feel the cold steel cutting
through his muscles; it is nothing more than a fillip on the neck.
Through trying so much to mitigate the pain of death, it has now become
little more than a joke, and might be abolished altogether.

The certainty of confounding Noel, of delivering him up to justice, of
taking vengeance upon him, alone kept old Tabaret up.

"It is clear," he murmured, "that the wretch forgot his things at the
railway station, in his haste to rejoin his mistress. Will they still be
found there? If he has had the prudence to go boldly, and ask for them
under a false name, I can see no further proofs against him. Madame
Chaffour's evidence won't help me. The hussy, seeing her lover in
danger, will deny what she has just told me; she will assert that Noel
left her long after ten o'clock. But I cannot think he