een too strong, and the train continued to
advance, the Nabob walking beside it, trying to open the accursed door
which was stuck fast, and making signs to the engine-driver. The
engine was not answering. "Stop, stop, there!" It did not stop. Losing
patience, he jumped on to the velvet-covered step, and in that fiery,
impulsive manner of his which had so delighted the old Bey, he cried,
his woolly head at the door, "Saint-Romans station, your Highness."

You know the sort of vague light there is in dreams, the colourless
empty atmosphere where everything has the look of a phantom. Jansoulet
was suddenly enveloped in this, stricken, paralyzed. He wanted to speak,
words would not come, his nerveless hand held the door so feebly that
he almost fell backward. What had he seen? On a divan at the back of
the saloon, reposing on his elbow, his beautiful dark head with its
long silky beard leaning on his hand, was the Bey, close wrapped in
his Oriental coat, without other ornaments than the large ribbon of the
Legion of Honour across his breast and the diamond in the aigrette
of his fez. He was fanning himself impassively with a little fan of
gold-embroidered strawwork. Two aides-de-camp and an engineer of the
railway company were standing beside him. Opposite, on another divan,
in a respectful attitude, but favoured evidently, as they were the only
ones seated in the Bey's presence, were two owl-like men, their long
whiskers falling on their white ties, one fat and the other thin. They
were the Hemerlingues, father and son, who had won over his Highness
and were bearing him off in triumph to Paris. What a horrible dream! All
three men, who knew Jansoulet well, looked at him coldly as though his
face recalled nothing. Piteously white, his forehead covered with sweat,
he stammered, "But, your Highness, are you not going to--" A vivid flash
of lightning, followed by a terrible peal of thunder, stopped the
words. But the lightning in the eyes of his sovereign seemed to him as
terrible. Sitting up, his arm outstretched, in guttural voice as of one
accustomed to roll the hard Arab syllables, but in pure French, the
Bey struck him down with the slow, carefully prepared words: "Go home,
swindler. The feet go where the heart guides. Mine will never enter the
house of the man who has cheated my country."

Jansoulet tried to say something. The Bey made a sign: "Go on." The
engineer pressed a button, a whistle replied, the train, which ha