"But you're alive still!" he protested angrily. "Your son will get it when you die!"
"My son thinks I'm dead," she replied, wearily. "His father told him I was. And when he was twenty-one he probably came into my fortune."
Laroque half-turned away with a quick gesture of impatience.
"What a fool you are!" he cried, disgustedly. "I don't suppose he saw a sou of it!" He was racking his mind for some lure that would draw her husband's name from her. But this last lead was fatal. Jacqueline glared at him suddenly, her eyes wild.
"What the hell's it to you?" she blazed out fiercely. "You've got nothing to do with it, have you? What business is it o' yours, anyway?"
"But you ought to clear it up!" protested Laroque, in a milder tone, as he saw that he had erred. "That's what Perissard thinks, and Perissard knows what he's talking about."
"What business is it of Perissard's?" she shouted. Laroque extended his hands soothingly.
"He only spoke in your interests!" he hastily explained. "When I told him you had brought your husband 300,000 francs, he asked me whether you had got them back again. I said I didn't know, and he declared that you had a perfect right to the money."
"Well, I shan't claim it!" declared Jacqueline, sullenly sinking back into her chair.
"Why not?" he persisted.