nough of the
dregs of life, and so I should have thought have you. You held a hand
on which to have won a fortune if you had played it as I bade you. Well,
you've played it, and where's the fortune? We can whistle for that as
a sailor whistles for wind. And, by Heaven, we'll need to whistle
presently if the weather in the troupe continues as it's set in. That
scoundrel Scaramouche has been at his ape's tricks with them. They've
suddenly turned moral. They won't sit at table with me any more." He
was spluttering between anger and sardonic mirth. "It was your friend
Scaramouche set them the example of that. He threatened my life
actually. Threatened my life! Called me... Oh, but what does that
matter? What matters is that the next thing to happen to us will be that
the Binet Troupe will discover it can manage without M. Binet and his
daughter. This scoundrelly bastard I've befriended has little by little
robbed me of everything. It's in his power to-day to rob me of my
troupe, and the knave's ungrateful enough and vile enough to make use of
his power.

"Let him," said mademoiselle contemptuously.

"Let him?" He was aghast. "And what's to become of us?"

"In no case will the Binet Troupe interest me much longer," said she. "I
shall be going to Paris soon. There are better theatres there than the
Feydau. There's Mlle. Montansier's theatre in the Palais Royal; there's
the Ambigu Comique; there's the Comedie Francaise; there's even a
possibility I may have a theatre of my own."

His eyes grew big for once. He stretched out a fat hand, and placed it
on one of hers. She noticed that it trembled.

"Has he promised that? Has he promised?"

She looked at him with her head on one side, eyes sly and a queer little
smile on her perfect lips.

"He did not refuse me when I asked it," she answered, with conviction
that all was as she desired it.

"Bah!" He withdrew his hand, and heaved himself up. There was disgust
on his face. "He did not refuse!" he mocked her; and then with passion:
"Had you acted as I advised you, he would have consented to anything
that you asked, and what is more he would have provided anything
that you asked--anything that lay within his means, and they are
inexhaustible. You have changed a certainty into a possibility, and
I hate possibilities--God of God! I have lived on possibilities, and
infernally near starved on them."

Had she known of the interview taking place at that moment at the
Chateau de