"Do not, good Count de Calembours, forsake us until my story is completed.
"You must go? Then I shall hasten.
"Friends, the miserable little tailor, this renegade, dastard and spy, had entered the highest circles in New York under the title which this man wears—the Count de Calembours!"
She swooped forward, she seized the arm of the retreating chevalier, and wheeled him round until he faced the company.
He was frightfully pale, his eyes flickered ominously, he glared helplessly at his tormentor, the beautiful bride-elect.
"What! has my fiance nothing to say?" jibed madame, with flashing eyes, green as a tigress. "Is he choked by a skein of thread? Felled by a thimble? Stabbed by a tailor's needle? Fie, fie! Ladislaus Schmolnitz, to let the coat fit you so well! To stand dumb as your own goose! Oh, cowardly little tailor!"
Shrilly the scoffing denunciation rang out; stepping back a pace she pointed her finger in his face and laughed wildly; and the good company, suddenly catching the resistless drollery of the farce, burst into a long, convulsive, mocking peal of merciless laughter, till the room rang again, the glasses jingled, and the poor little tailor threw himself on his knees before the ferocious Nemesis and begged for mercy.
But the good company pointed their fingers in the wretch's appalled face and hissed him down; and the air seemed alive with ten thousand serpents, and the room swam around with eyes of mockery and ire; and deafened, horror-stricken, and utterly routed, the poor little tailor fell forward on the carpet in a dead swoon.
When he recovered his senses, the room was deserted, the lights were out, and one small, airy figure stood at a distant door with a taper in her hand and looking on the fallen hero.
"Better, good Monsieur Schmolnitz?" mocked Madame Hesslein.