Troubled with the spleen!  I believe myself to be as even-tempered and as ready to fall in with a joke as most men; but I should have liked at that moment to punch Franz Mueller’s head.  Gracious heavens! into what a position he had now brought us!  What was to be done?  How were we to get out of it?  It was now just seven; and we had already been upon the water for more than an hour.  What should we have to pay for the boat?  And when we had paid for the boat, how much money should we have left to pay for the dinner?  Not for our own dinners—­ah, no!  For ma tante’s dinner (and ma tante had a hungry eye) and for la petite Marie’s dinner; and la petite Marie, plump, rosy, and well-liking, looked as if she might have a capital appetite upon occasion!  Should we have as much as two and a half francs?  I doubted it.  And then, in the absence of a miracle, what could we do with two and a half francs, if we had them?  A miserable sum!—­convertible, perhaps, into as much bouilli, bread and cheese, and thin country wine as might have satisfied our own hunger in a prosaic and commonplace way; but for four persons, two of them women!...

And this was not the worst of it.  I thought I knew Mueller well enough by this time to feel that he would entirely dismiss this minor consideration of ways and means; that he would order the dinner as recklessly as if we had twenty francs apiece in our pockets; and that he would not only order it, but eat it and preside at it with all the gayety and audacity in life.

Then would come the horrible retribution of the bill!

I felt myself turn red and hot at the mere thought of it.

Then a dastardly idea insinuated itself into my mind.  I had my return-ticket in my waistcoat-pocket:—­what if I slipped away presently to the station and went back to Paris by the next train, leaving my clever friend to improvise his way out of his own scrape as best he could?

In the meanwhile, as I was rowing with the stream, we soon got back to Courbevoie.

“Are you mad?” I said, as, having landed the ladies, Mueller and I delivered up the boat to its owner.

“Didn’t I admit it, two or three hours ago?” he replied.  “I wonder you don’t get tired, mon cher, of asking the same question so often.”

“Four francs, fifty centimes, Messieurs,” said the boatman, having made fast his boat to the landing-place.

“Four francs, fifty centimes!” I echoed, in dismay.

Even Mueller looked aghast.

“My good fellow,” he said, “do you take us for coiners?”

“Hire of boat, two francs the hour.  These gentlemen have been out nearly one hour and a half—­three francs.  Hire of bait and fishing-tackle, one franc fifty.  Total, four francs and a half,” replied the boatman, putting out a great brown palm.

Mueller, who was acting as cashier and paymaster, pulled out his purse, deposited one solitary half-franc in the middle of that brown palm, and suggested that the boatman and he should toss up for the remaining four francs—­or race for them—­or play for them—­or fight for them.  The boatman, however, indignantly rejected each successive proposal, and, being paid at last, retired with a decrescendo of oaths.