"Then the contract is lost?"
"I never thought it would go through, General. I wasn't such a d——d fool."
"But at least a word from you will save my name. You can deny the letter."
"I could deny it."
"Are you wishing to tell me that there is any doubt?"
"No doubt at all. Unfortunately, it was read, by mistake, in the Hotel Ritz the night it reached me. You should see Morris, of the New York Mitre. He might do something for you."
The man rose, white as a sheet and broken. He may or may not have understood the nature of the trap into which he had fallen, but it was clear to him that John Faber could or would do little for him. He went out into the street to be offered a copy of La Guêpe, and to hear the newsboy cry the latest news of this surpassing jobbery.
A less consummate artist than Faber would have spoken of the Rue de Fleurus, and of what happened there forty years ago. Hubert d'Arny had not the remotest notion that the man who had ruined him was the son of that American citizen who had been shot by his orders at the crisis of the great debacle.
III
Paris licked its lips over the scandal, and then stood aghast.