thousand francs I placed into your hands?"

He made no reply.

"And our hundred and twenty thousand francs?" groaned M. and Mme.
Desclavettes.

"And my sixty thousand francs?" shouted M. Chapelain, with a
blasphemous oath.

The cashier shrugged his shoulders. "Lost," he said, "irrevocably
lost!"

Then their rage exceeded all bounds. Then they forgot that this
unfortunate man had been their friend for twenty years, that they
were his guests; and they commenced heaping upon him threats and
insults without name.

He did not even deign to defend himself.

"Go on," he uttered, "go on. When a poor dog, carried away by the
current, is drowning, men of heart cast stones at him from the bank.
Go on!"

"You should have told us that you speculated," screamed M.
Desclavettes.

On hearing these words, he straightened himself up, and with a
gesture so terrible that the others stepped back frightened.

"What!" said he, in a tone of crushing irony, "it is this evening
only, that you discover that I speculated? Kind friends! Where,
then, and in whose pockets, did you suppose I was getting the
enormous interests I have been paying you for years? Where have
you ever seen honest money, the money of labor, yield twelve or
fourteen per cent? The money that yields thus is the money of the
gaming table, the money of the bourse. Why did you bring me your
funds? Because you were fully satisfied that I knew how to handle
the cards. Ah! If I was to tell you that I had doubled your capital,
you would not ask how I did it, nor whether I had stocked the cards.
You would virtuously pocket the money. But I have lost: I am a
thief. Well, so be it. But, then, you are all my accomplices. It
is the avidity of the dupes which induces the trickery of the
sharpers."

Here he was interrupted by the servant coming in. "Sir," she
exclaimed excitedly, "O sir! the courtyard is full of police agents.
They are speaking to the concierge. They are coming up stairs: I
hear them!"

III

According to the time and place where they are uttered, there are
words which acquire a terrible significance. In this disordered
room, in the midst of these excited people, that word, the "police,"
sounded like a thunderclap.

"Do not open," Maxence ordered; "do not open, however they may ring
or knock. Let them burst the door first."

The very excess of her fright restored to Mme. Favoral a portion of
her energy. Throwing herself before h