“No one but Toto,” replied Fifi, pinching Toto’s ear.
Cartouche raised his arms in despair. He could only groan:
“Oh, Fifi! Oh, Fifi!”
“Don’t ‘Oh Fifi’ me any more, Cartouche, after your behavior to me,” cried Fifi indignantly, “and after I have taken your advice and given the money away, and Louis Bourcet has jilted me—as he did as soon as he found I had no fortune—”
“Didn’t I tell you he would?”
“I didn’t need anybody to tell me that. Louis Bourcet is one of the virtuous who make one sick of virtue. But at least after you made him jilt me—”
“I made him jilt you!”
“Certainly you did. How many times shall I have to prove to you that it was you who put it into my head to give the money away? And now, I want to ask, having caused me to lose the chance of marrying the most correct young man in Paris, you—you—ought to marry me yourself!”
Fifi said this last in a very low, sweet voice, her cheek resting upon Toto’s sleek, black head, her elbow on the sill of the half-door. Cartouche walked quite to the other end of the room and stood with his back to Fifi, and said not one word.
Fifi waited a minute or two, Cartouche maintaining his strange silence. Then, Fifi, glancing down, saw on a little table within the room, and close to the half-door, a stick of chalk. With that she wrote in large white letters on Toto’s black back: