This, of course, he never would admit.  All that he told me one day was that Leah, with the characteristic timidity of her race, refused to marry him unless she could obtain her father’s consent to the union.  Old Goldberg, duly approached on the matter, flatly forbade his daughter to have anything further to do with that fortune-hunter, that parasite, that beggarly pick-thank—­such, Sir, were but a few complimentary epithets which he hurled with great volubility at his daughter’s absent suitor.

It was from Mlle. Goldberg, senior, that my friend and I had the details of that stormy interview between father and daughter; after which, she declared that interviews between the lovers would necessarily become very difficult of arrangement.  From which you will gather that the worthy soul, though she was as ugly as sin, was by this time on the side of the angels.  Indeed, she was more than that.  She professed herself willing to aid and abet them in every way she could.  This Rochez confided to me, together with his assurance that he was determined to take his Fate into his own hands and, since the beautiful Leah would not come to him of her own accord, to carry her off by force.

Ah, my dear Sir, those were romantic days, you must remember!  Days when men placed the possession of the woman they loved above every treasure, every consideration upon earth.  Ah, romance!  Romance, Sir, was the breath of our nostrils, the blood in our veins!  Imagine how readily we all fell in with my friend’s plans.  I, of course, was the moving spirit in it all; mine was the genius which was destined to turn gilded romance into grim reality.  Yes, grim!  For you shall see! . . .

Mlle. Goldberg, senior, who appropriately enough was named Sarah, gave us the clue how to proceed, after which my genius worked alone.

You must know that old Goldberg’s house in the Rue des Medecins—­a large apartment house in which he occupied a few rooms on the ground floor behind his shop—­backed on to a small uncultivated garden which ended in a tall brick wall, the meeting-place of all the felines in the neighbourhood, and in which there was a small postern gate, now disused.  This gate gave on a narrow cul-de-sac—­grandiloquently named Passage Corneille—­which was flanked on the opposite side by the tall boundary wall of an adjacent convent.

That cul-de-sac was marked out from the very first in my mind as our objective.  Around and about it, as it were, did I build the edifice of my schemes, aided by the ever-willing Sarah.  The old maid threw herself into the affair with zest, planning and contriving like a veritable strategist; and I must admit that she was full of resource and invention.  We were now in mid-May and enjoying a spell of hot summer weather.  This gave the inventive Sarah the excuse for using the back garden as a place wherein to sit in the cool of the evening in the company of her niece.

Ah, you see the whole thing now at a glance, do you not?  The postern gate, the murky night, the daring lover, the struggling maiden, the willing accomplices.  The actors were all there, ready for the curtain to be rung up on the palpitating drama.