“I!” stammered M. Costeclar, so visibly agitated, that the clerks could not help laughing.
“Yes. I wish to know if you have been more faithful to your word than the stockholders of whom you are speaking, and whether you have done as we had agreed.”
“Certainly; and, if you find me here—”
But M. de Tregars, placing his own hand over his shoulder, stopped him short.
“I think I know what brought you here,” he uttered; “and in a few moments I shall have ascertained.”
“I swear to you.”
“Don’t swear. If I am mistaken, so much the better for you. If I am not mistaken, I’ll prove to you that it is dangerous to try any sharp game on me, though I am not a business-man.”
Meantime M. Latterman, seeing no customer coming to take the place of the one who had left, became impatient at last, and appeared upon the threshold of his private office.
He was a man still young, small, thick-set, and vulgar. At the first glance, nothing of him could be seen but his abdomen,—a big, great, and ponderous abdomen, seat of his thoughts, and tabernacle of his aspirations, over which dangled a double gold chain, loaded with trinkets. Above an apoplectic neck, red as that of a turkey-cock, stood his little head, covered with coarse red hair, cut very short. He wore a heavy beard, trimmed in the form of a fan. His large, full-moon face was divided in two by a nose as flat as a Kalmuck’s, and illuminated by two small eyes, in which could be read the most thorough duplicity.
Seeing M. de Tregars and M. Costeclar engaged in conversation,