puty; and he says everywhere that he has
found, to marry his daughter, a gentleman who bears one of the
oldest names in France,--the Marquis de Tregars."

"Why, this is the Marquis de Tregars!" exclaimed Maxence, pointing
to Marius.

For the first time, M. Saint Pavin took the trouble to examine his
visitor; and he, who knew life too well not to be a judge of men,
he seemed surprised.

"Please excuse me, sir," he uttered with a politeness very different
from his usual manner, "and permit me to ask you if you know the
reasons why M. de Thaller is so prodigiously anxious to have you
for a son-in-law."

"I think," replied M. de Tregars coldly, "that M. de Thaller would
not be sorry to deprive me of the right to seek the causes of my
father's ruin."

But he was interrupted by a great noise of voices in the adjoining
room; and almost at once there was a loud knock at the door, and a
voice called,

"In the name of the law!"

The editor of "The Pilot" had become whiter than his shirt.

"That's what I was afraid of," he said. "Thaller has got ahead of
me; and perhaps I may be lost."

Meantime he did not lose his wits. Quick as thought he took out of
a drawer a package of letters, threw them into the fireplace, and
set fire to them, saying, in a voice made hoarse by emotion and
anger,

"No one shall come in until they are burnt."

But it required an incredibly long time to make them catch fire;
and M. Saint Pavin, kneeling before the hearth, was stirring them
up, and scattering them, to make them burn faster.

"And now," said M. de Tregars, "will you hesitate to deliver up
the Baron de Thaller into the hands of justice?"

He turned around with flashing eyes.

"Now," he replied, "if I wish to save myself, I must save him too.
Don't you understand that he holds me?"

And, seeing that the last sheets of his correspondence were consumed,

"You may open now," he said to Maxence.

Maxence obeyed; and a commissary of police, wearing his scarf of
office, rushed into the room; whilst his men, not without difficulty,
kept back the crowd in the outer office.

The commissary, who was an old hand, and had perhaps been on a
hundred expeditions of this kind, had surveyed the scene at a
glance. Noticing in the fireplace the carbonized debris, upon
which still fluttered an expiring flame,

"That's the reason, then," he said, "why you were so long opening
the door?"

A sarcastic smile appeared upon the lips of the