“Oh, rubbish! I’m going third. Stay behind if you like. Ma foi! see over there standing beside that woman with the plum-colored face! It’s old De Nani, and he has seen us. Wait—wait for me, Célestin; I wish to speak to a friend. My dear Marquis,” cried Toto, dragging the old man aside, “I am going on a little private business into the country. In fact, I am going with a lady and my friend Gaillard, but I do not want her to know my identity—you understand.”

“Parfaitement,” replied the old beast, grinning under his paint and glancing at Célestin, and vowing in his own mind to do Toto an evil turn, if such a thing were possible.

For by a strange chance Struve’s enemy, to whose house he had been driven drunk on the previous morning, was also his most deadly enemy. The Comte de la Fosse was this gentleman’s name, and on descending in a flowered dressing gown on the previous morning to see what the hubbub was about, he had found M. le Marquis de Nani seated without his wig in the middle of the hall and singing ribald songs as he attempted to remove his boots. The Comte de la Fosse had ordered his enemy to be put to bed, and later in the day read him a pious lecture on the evils of drink and the disgrace he had brought on the old nobility. Toto was indirectly the cause of all this—directly, for all that old De Nani knew. Needless to say, he felt very bitter.

“And above all things,” said Toto, “I don’t want my mother to know.”

“I understand,” said De Nani. “I, too, am going into the country—to Chantilly.”

“Good-by.”

“Au revoir. But stay. Where shall I meet you again? Could I see you to-night?”

“Be at the Café de la Paix,” said Gaillard, who had come up to see what was going on, and what this old blood-sucker was saying to his Toto, “and ask for M. Théodore Wolf. Anyone will show you him. He is a journalist with a black beard. I have made a rendezvous for eight with him. We will be there.”

“Yes,” said Toto, “be there at eight.”

And De Nani left them, not for Chantilly, indeed, but to take a cab and drive to the Boulevard Haussmann and say to the Princesse de Cammora: