Mademoiselle Dollon drew herself up.
“Sir,” she declared, a good deal offended, “I don’t know what you take me for, but I am an honest woman—”
“Well, well, I felt sure of it the moment I set eyes on you; but there, it’s as well to understand one another from the beginning ... So please sign your name there, mademoiselle”—and with his great hairy finger, M. Moche pointed out the place.
This formality completed, she bade a hasty farewell to M. Moche, who escorted her politely to the door.
“Brigand, scoundrel, blackguard, thief!”—a torrent of insults, followed by a torrent of blows ... M. Moche was on the point of recrossing his threshold when he was struck full in the face and felled to the ground. As he lay there, he felt the weight of a man’s body crushing him, holding him forcibly down.
But Moche, for all his years, was a wonderfully active man, and quite unexpectedly nimble. In one second he had shaken off the incubus and leapt to the other end of the room, where he stood glaring at his assailant.
It was Paulet he saw, but Paulet changed beyond recognition—eyes starting out of his head, mouth set hard, features convulsed, muscles taut.
The lover of Nini Guinon, knife in hand, was for hurling himself at M. Moche, when suddenly he stopped dead. The sharp click of a cocked pistol had struck him motionless where he stood.
Moche, quick as lightning, had not only dodged the villain’s furious onslaught, but had whipped a revolver from his pocket and pointed the weapon straight at the scoundrel’s breast—
“Not another step,” he vociferated, “or I shoot you like a dog!”