"Monsieur le Duc, you really are under a mistake," said Fayolle, now quite grave. "You must remember that we finally agreed on four thousand."
"I remember all about it. It is you who have a bad memory. Here," he added to a clerk who came in with the receipt-form, "go downstairs, one of you, to the stables, and ask Benigno how much I told him I was to give for Apollyon?"
And at the same time, taking advantage of the moment when Fayolle looked at the messenger, he made a significant grimace at the man. The coachman's answer by the clerk was that the horse was to be three thousand five hundred pesetas.
Thereupon the dealer grew angry. He was quite positive that the bargain had stood at eight hundred dollars, and it was in this belief that he had delivered it. Otherwise the horse should never have left his stable.
Requena allowed him to talk himself out, only uttering grunts of dissent, without exciting himself in the smallest degree. Only when Fayolle talked of having the horse back, he said in a lazy tone:
"Then you evidently have some one in your eye who will give you eight hundred, and you want to be off the bargain?"
"Monsieur le Duc, I swear to you that it is nothing of the kind. Only I am positive I am right."
The banker was seized by an opportune fit of coughing; his eyes were bloodshot, and his cheeks turned purple. Then he deliberately wiped his mouth and rose, and said in his most boorish manner:
"Bless me, man! Don't put yourself out over a few miserable pesetas."
But he did not produce them.