"Don't listen to him, petite mère," interposed one of two out of the crowd. "He is a white-livered skunk to talk to you like that."
"Very well! Very well!" quoth Paul Friche, and he spat vigorously on the ground in token that henceforth he divested himself from any responsibility in this matter, "don't listen to me. Lose a benefit of twenty, perhaps forty francs for the sake of a bit of fun. Very well! Very well!" he continued as he turned and slouched out of the group to the further end of the room, where he sat down on a barrel. He drew the stump of a clay pipe out of the pocket of his breeches, stuffed it into his mouth, stretched his long legs out before him and sucked away at his pipe with complacent detachment. "I didn't know," he added with biting sarcasm by way of a parting shot, "that you and Lemoine had come into a fortune recently and that forty or fifty francs are nothing to you now."
"Forty or fifty? Come! come!" protested Lemoine feebly.
II
Yvonne's fate was hanging in the balance. The attitude of the small crowd was no less threatening than before, but immediate action was withheld while the Lemoines obviously debated in their minds what was best to be done. The instinct to "have at" an aristo with all the accumulated hatred of many generations was warring with the innate rapacity of the Breton peasant.
"Forty or fifty?" reiterated Paul Friche emphatically. "Can't you see that the wench is an aristo escaped out of Le Bouffay or the entrepôt?" he added contemptuously.
"I know that she is an aristo," said the woman, "that's why I want to throw her out."
"And get nothing for your pains," retorted Friche roughly. "If you wait for her friends we may all of us get as much as twenty francs each to hold our tongues."
"Twenty francs each...." The murmur was repeated with many a sigh of savage gluttony, by every one in the room—and repeated again and again—especially by the women.
"You are a fool, Paul Friche ..." commented Lemoine.