Again the pleasant smile flickered like the light of a fire in a dark place.
“That,” was the reply, “is the affair of the miller.”
“But,” conceded Jacquetot, meditatively selecting a new cigar from a box which he had reached without moving from his chair, “but the people—they are fools, hein!”
“Ah!” with a protesting shrug, as if deprecating the enunciation of such a platitude.
Then he passed through into a little room behind the shop—a little room where no daylight penetrated, because there was no window to it. It depended for daylight upon the shop, with which it communicated by a door of which the upper half was glass. But this glass was thickly curtained with the material called Turkey-red, threefold.
And the tobacconist was left alone in his shop, smoking gravely. There are some people like oysters, inasmuch as they leave an after-taste behind them. The man who had just gone into the little room at the rear of the tobacconist's shop of the Rue St. Gingolphe in Paris was one of these. And the taste he left behind him was rather disquieting. One was apt to feel that there was a mistake somewhere in the ordering of human affairs, and that this man was one of its victims.
In a few minutes two men passed hastily through the shop into the little room, with scarcely so much as a nod for Mr. Jacquetot.