He robbed me, Sir, shamefully, despite the fact that he had ten per cent, commission on all the profits of the firm.  I gave him twenty francs out of the money which I had earned at the sweat of my brow in the service of Estelle Bachelier.  Twenty francs, Sir!  Reckoning two hundred francs as business profit on the affair, a generous provision you will admit!  And yet he taunted me with having received a thousand.  This was mere guesswork, of course, and I took no notice of his taunts:  did the brains that conceived the business deserve no payment?  Was my labour to be counted as dross?—­the humiliation, the blows which I had to endure while he sat in hoggish content, eating and sleeping without thought for the morrow?  After which he calmly pocketed the twenty francs to earn which he had not raised one finger, and then demanded more.

No, no, my dear Sir, you will believe me or not, that man could not go straight.  Times out of count he would try and deceive me, despite the fact that, once or twice, he very nearly came hopelessly to grief in the attempt.

Now, just to give you an instance.  About this time Paris was in the grip of a gang of dog-thieves as unscrupulous and heartless as they were daring.  Can you wonder at it? with that awful penury about and a number of expensive “tou-tous” running about the streets under the very noses of the indigent proletariat?  The ladies of the aristocracy and of the wealthy bourgeoisie had imbibed this craze for lap-dogs during their sojourn in England at the time of the emigration, and being women of the Latin race and of undisciplined temperament, they were just then carrying their craze to excess.

As I was saying, this indulgence led to wholesale thieving.  Tou-tous were abstracted from their adoring mistresses with marvellous adroitness; whereupon two or three days would elapse while the adoring mistress wept buckets full of tears and set the police of M. Fouche, Duc d’Otrante, by the ears in search of her pet.  The next act in the tragi-comedy would be an anonymous demand for money—­varying in amount in accordance with the known or supposed wealth of the lady—­and an equally anonymous threat of dire vengeance upon the tou-tou if the police were put upon the track of the thieves.

You will ask me, no doubt, what all this had to do with Theodore.  Well!  I will tell you.

You must know that of late he had become extraordinarily haughty and independent.  I could not keep him to his work.  His duties were to sweep the office—­he did not do it; to light the fires—­I had to light them myself every morning; to remain in the anteroom and show clients in—­he was never at his post.  In fact he was never there when I did want him:  morning, noon and night he was out—­gadding about and coming home, Sir, only to eat and sleep.  I was seriously thinking of giving him the sack.  And then one day he disappeared!  Yes, Sir, disappeared completely as if the earth had