He demurred for a while, but I was firm, and after he had threatened to thrash me, to knock me down, and to denounce me to the police, he gave in and went to fetch the money.

5.

When I remembered Theodore—­Theodore, whom only a thin partition wall had separated from the full knowledge of the value of his ill-gotten treasure!—­I could have torn my hair out by the roots with the magnitude of my rage.  He, the traitor, the blackleg, was about to triumph, where I, Hector Ratichon, had failed!  He had but to take the bracelet to Mlle. Mars himself and obtain the munificent reward whilst I, after I had taken so many risks and used all the brains and tact wherewith Nature had endowed me, would be left with the meagre remnants of the fifty francs which M. Jean Duval had so grudgingly thrown to me.  Twenty-five francs for a gold locket, ten francs for a bouquet, another ten for bonbons, and five for gratuities to the stage-doorkeeper!  Make the calculation, my good Sir, and see what I had left.  If it had not been for the five francs which I had found in Theodore’s pocket last night, I would at this moment not only have been breakfastless, but also absolutely penniless.

As it was, my final hope—­and that a meagre one—­was to arouse one spark of honesty in the breast of the arch-traitor, and either by cajolery or threats, to induce him to share his ill-gotten spoils with me.

I had left him snoring and strapped to the chair-bedstead, and when I opened the office door I was marvelling in my mind whether I could really bear to see him dying slowly of starvation with that savoury pie tantalizingly under his nose.  The crash which I had heard a few minutes ago prepared me for a change of scene.  Even so, I confess that the sight which I beheld glued me to the threshold.  There sat Theodore at the table, finishing the last morsel of pie, whilst the chair-bedstead lay in a tangled heap upon the floor.

I cannot tell you how nasty he was to me about the whole thing, although I showed myself at once ready to forgive him all his lies and his treachery, and was at great pains to explain to him how I had given up my own bed and strapped him into it solely for the benefit of his health, seeing that at the moment he was threatened with delirium tremens.

He would not listen to reason or to the most elementary dictates of friendship.  Having poured the vials of his bilious temper over my devoted head, he became as perverse and as obstinate as a mule.  With the most consummate impudence I ever beheld in any human being, he flatly denied all knowledge of the bracelet.

Whilst I talked he stalked past me into the ante-chamber, where he at once busied himself in collecting all his goods and chattels.  These he stuffed into his pockets until he appeared to be bulging all over his ugly-body; then he went to the door ready to go out.  On the threshold he turned and gave me a supercilious glance over his shoulder.