“You little wretch,” he yelled, “you have dared to gammon an officer; you deserve—­”

And then he lifted his hand as if to deal a blow such as would have felled an ox.  The little maid shrank back, terrified, while the amazed domino players looked, openmouthed.  However, the major did not linger there—­he pushed the divan door open and appeared before Melanie and Burle just as the widow was playfully making the captain sip his grog in small spoonfuls, as if she were feeding a pet canary.  Only the ex-magistrate and the chemist had come that evening, and they had retired early in a melancholy frame of mind.  Then Melanie, being in want of three hundred francs for the morrow, had taken advantage of the opportunity to cajole the captain.

“Come.” she said, “open your mouth; ain’t it nice, you greedy piggy-wiggy?”

Burle, flushing scarlet, with glazed eyes and sunken figure, was sucking the spoon with an air of intense enjoyment.

“Good heavens!” roared the major from the threshold.  “You now play tricks on me, do you?  I’m sent to the roundabout and told that you never came here, and yet all the while here you are, addling your silly brains.”

Burle shuddered, pushing the grog away, while Melanie stepped angrily in front of him as if to shield him with her portly figure, but Laguitte looked at her with that quiet, resolute expression well known to women who are familiar with bodily chastisement.

“Leave us,” he said curtly.

She hesitated for the space of a second.  She almost felt the gust of the expected blow, and then, white with rage, she joined Phrosine in the outer room.

When the two men were alone Major Laguitte walked up to Burle, looked at him and, slightly stooping, yelled into his face these two words:  “You pig!”

The captain, quite dazed, endeavored to retort, but he had not time to do so.

“Silence!” resumed the major.  “You have bamboozled a friend.  You palmed off on me a lot of forged receipts which might have sent both of us to the gallows.  Do you call that proper behavior?  Is that the sort of trick to play a friend of thirty years’ standing?”

Burle, who had fallen back in his chair, was livid; his limbs shook as if with ague.  Meanwhile the major, striding up and down and striking the tables wildly with his fists, continued:  “So you have become a thief like the veriest scribbling cur of a clerk, and all for the sake of that creature here!  If at least you had stolen for your mother’s sake it would have been honorable!  But, curse it, to play tricks and bring the money into this shanty is what I cannot understand!  Tell me—­what are you made of at your age to go to the dogs as you are going all for the sake of a creature like a grenadier!”

“You gamble—­” stammered the captain.

“Yes, I do—­curse it!” thundered the major, lashed into still greater fury by this remark.  “And I am a pitiful rogue to do so, because it swallows up all my pay and doesn’t redound to the honor of the French army.  However, I don’t steal.  Kill yourself, if it pleases you; starve your mother and the boy, but respect the regimental cashbox and don’t drag your friends down with you.”