"I am going to entrust you with a commission for your husband. Tell him from me to buy to-morrow ten thousand francs' worth of the Morocco loan, which is quoted at seventy-two, and I promise him that he will gain from sixty to eighty thousand francs before three months are over. Recommend the most positive silence to him. Tell him from me that the expedition to Tangiers is decided on, and that the French government will guarantee the debt of Morocco. But do not let anything out about it. It is a State secret that I am entrusting to you."
She listened to him seriously, and murmured: "Thank you, I will tell my husband this evening. You can reckon on him; he will not talk. He is a very safe man, and there is no danger."
But she had eaten all the sweetmeats. She crushed up the bag between her hands and flung it into the fireplace. Then she said, "Let us go to bed," and without getting up, began to unbutton George's waistcoat. All at once she stopped, and pulling out between two fingers a long hair, caught in a buttonhole, began to laugh. "There, you have brought away one of Madeleine's hairs. There is a faithful husband for you."
Then, becoming once more serious, she carefully examined on her head the almost imperceptible thread she had found, and murmured: "It is not Madeleine's, it is too dark."
He smiled, saying: "It is very likely one of the maid's."
But she was inspecting the waistcoat with the attention of a detective, and collected a second hair rolled round a button; then she perceived a third, and pale and somewhat trembling, exclaimed: "Oh, you have been sleeping with a woman who has wrapped her hair round all your buttons."
He was astonished, and gasped out: "No, you are mad."
All at once he remembered, understood it all, was uneasy at first, and then denied the charge with a chuckle, not vexed at the bottom that she should suspect him of other loves. She kept on searching, and still found hairs, which she rapidly untwisted and threw on the carpet. She had guessed matters with her artful woman's instinct, and stammered out, vexed, angry, and ready to cry: "She loves you, she does—and she wanted you to take away something belonging to her. Oh, what a traitor you are!" But all at once she gave a cry, a shrill cry of nervous joy. "Oh! oh! it is an old woman—here is a white hair. Ah, you go in for old women now! Do they pay you, eh—do they pay you? Ah, so you have come to old women, have you? Then you have no longer any need of me. Keep the other one."
She rose, ran to her bodice thrown onto a chair, and began hurriedly to put it on again. He sought to retain her, stammering confusedly: "But, no, Clo, you are silly. I do not know anything about it. Listen now—stay here. Come, now—stay here."
She repeated: "Keep your old woman—keep her. Have a ring made out of her hair—out of her white hair. You have enough of it for that."