icer need wear no disguise."

Corentin hurried downstairs to verify his suspicions: Carlos was getting
into the fly.

"Hallo! Monsieur l'Abbe!" cried Corentin.

Carlos looked around, saw Corentin, and got in quickly. Still, Corentin
had time to say:

"That was all I wanted to know.--Quai Malaquais," he shouted to the
driver with diabolical mockery in his tone and expression.

"I am done!" said Jacques Collin to himself. "They have got me. I must
get ahead of them by sheer pace, and, above all, find out what they want
of us."

Corentin had seen the Abbe Carlos Herrera five or six times, and the
man's eyes were unforgettable. Corentin had suspected him at once from
the cut of his shoulders, then by his puffy face, and the trick of three
inches of added height gained by a heel inside the shoe.

"Ah! old fellow, they have drawn you," said Corentin, finding no one in
the room but Peyrade and Contenson.

"Who?" cried Peyrade, with metallic hardness; "I will spend my last days
in putting him on a gridiron and turning him on it."

"It is the Abbe Carlos Herrera, the Corentin of Spain, as I suppose.
This explains everything. The Spaniard is a demon of the first water,
who has tried to make a fortune for that little young man by coining
money out of a pretty baggage's bolster.--It is your lookout if you
think you can measure your skill with a man who seems to me the very
devil to deal with."

"Oh!" exclaimed Contenson, "he fingered the three hundred thousand
francs the day when Esther was arrested; he was in the cab. I remember
those eyes, that brow, and those marks of the smallpox."

"Oh! what a fortune my Lydie might have had!" cried Peyrade.

"You may still play the nabob," said Corentin. "To keep an eye on Esther
you must keep up her intimacy with Val-Noble. She was really Lucien's
mistress."

"They have got more than five hundred thousand francs out of Nucingen
already," said Contenson.

"And they want as much again," Corentin went on. "The Rubempre estate is
to cost a million.--Daddy," added he, slapping Peyrade on the shoulder,
"you may get more than a hundred thousand francs to settle on Lydie."

"Don't tell me that, Corentin. If your scheme should fail, I cannot tell
what I might not do----"

"You will have it by to-morrow perhaps! The Abbe, my dear fellow, is
most astute; we shall have to kiss his spurs; he is a very superior
devil. But I have him sure enough. He is not a fool, and he will knock
und