before he stops payment; he was lost
in conjectures as to the reasons of the depravity buried in the depths
of Valerie's heart, and still believed himself the victim of some
practical joke. As they crossed the Pont Royal, life seemed to him
so blank, so utterly a void, and so out of joint from his financial
difficulties, that he was within an ace of yielding to the evil
prompting that bid him fling Crevel into the river and throw himself in
after.

On reaching the Rue du Dauphin, which had not yet been widened, Crevel
stopped before a door in a wall. It opened into a long corridor paved
with black-and-white marble, and serving as an entrance-hall, at the end
of which there was a flight of stairs and a doorkeeper's lodge, lighted
from an inner courtyard, as is often the case in Paris. This courtyard,
which was shared with another house, was oddly divided into two unequal
portions. Crevel's little house, for he owned it, had additional
rooms with a glass skylight, built out on to the adjoining plot, under
conditions that it should have no story added above the ground floor, so
that the structure was entirely hidden by the lodge and the projecting
mass of the staircase.

This back building had long served as a store-room, backshop, and
kitchen to one of the shops facing the street. Crevel had cut off
these three rooms from the rest of the ground floor, and Grindot had
transformed them into an inexpensive private residence. There were two
ways in--from the front, through the shop of a furniture-dealer, to whom
Crevel let it at a low price, and only from month to month, so as to be
able to get rid of him in case of his telling tales, and also through a
door in the wall of the passage, so ingeniously hidden as to be almost
invisible. The little apartment, comprising a dining-room, drawing-room,
and bedroom, all lighted from above, and standing partly on Crevel's
ground and partly on his neighbor's, was very difficult to find. With
the exception of the second-hand furniture-dealer, the tenants knew
nothing of the existence of this little paradise.

The doorkeeper, paid to keep Crevel's secrets, was a capital cook. So
Monsieur le Maire could go in and out of his inexpensive retreat at any
hour of the night without any fear of being spied upon. By day, a lady,
dressed as Paris women dress to go shopping, and having a key, ran
no risk in coming to Crevel's lodgings; she would stop to look at the
cheapened goods, ask the price,