don't be afraid. I wish you no harm," said Jansoulet sadly. "Only I
have come to beg you to do no more to me."

He stooped to breathe. The banker, bewildered and frightened, opened
wide his round owl's eyes in presence of this suffocating emotion.

"Listen, Lazarus; it is you who are the stronger in this war we
have been waging on each other for so long. I am down; yes, down. My
shoulders have touched the ground. Now, be generous; spare your old
chum. Give me quarter; come, give me quarter."

This southerner was trembling, defeated and softened by the emotional
display of the funeral ceremony. Hemerlingue, as he stood facing him,
was hardly more courageous. The gloomy music, the open grave, the
speeches, the cannonade of that lofty philosophy of inevitable death,
all these things had worked on the feelings of this fat baron. The voice
of his old comrade completed the awakening of whatever there remained of
human in that packet of gelatine.

His old chum! It was the first time for ten years--since their
quarrel--that he had seen him so near. How many things were recalled to
him by those sun-tanned features, those broad shoulders, so ill adapted
for the wearing of embroidered coats! The thin woollen rug full of
holes, in which they used to wrap themselves both to sleep on the bridge
of the _Sinai_, the food shared in brotherly fashion, the wanderings
through the burned-up country round Marseilles, where they used to steal
big onions and eat them raw by the side of some ditch, the dreams, the
schemings, the pence put into a common fund, and, when fortune had begun
to smile on them, the fun they had had together, those excellent quiet
little suppers over which they would tell each other everything, with
their elbows on the table.

How can one ever reach the point of seriously quarrelling when one knows
the other so well, when they have lived together like two twins at the
breast of the lean and strong nurse, Poverty, sharing her sour milk and
her rough caresses! These thoughts passed through Hemerlingue's mind
like a flash of lightning. Almost instinctively he let his heavy hand
fall into the one which the Nabob was holding out to him. Something of
the primitive animal was roused in them, something stronger than their
enmity, and these two men, each of whom for ten years had been trying
to bring the other to ruin and disgrace, fell to talking without any
reserve.

Generally, between friends newly met, after the first