However, I had no leisure to follow that track, nor was I much concerned to attempt the task.  The next day would be time—­if I were alive the next day:  and I cared little if the secret were never revealed.  It was nothing to me—­for it never crossed my mind that fresh designs might be hatched in the stable.  Dismissing the matter, I did as Bontet advised, and walked upstairs to my room; and as luck would have it, I met Mme. Delhasse plump on the landing, she being on her way to the sitting room.  I bowed low.  Madame gave me a look of hatred and passed by me.  As she displayed no surprise, it was evident that the duke had carried or sent word of my arrival.  I was not minded to let her go without a word or two.

“Madame—­” I began; but she was too quick for me.  She burst out in a torrent of angry abuse.  Her resentment, dammed so long for want of opportunity, carried her away.  To speak soberly and by the card, the woman was a hideous thing to see and hear; for in her wrath at me, she spared not to set forth in unshamed plainness her designs, nor to declare of what rewards, promised by the duke, my interference had gone near to rob her and still rendered uncertain.  Her voice rose, for all her efforts to keep it low, and she mingled foul words of the duchess and of me with scornful curses on the virtue of her daughter.  I could say nothing; I stood there wondering that such creatures lived, amazed that Marie Delhasse must call such an one her mother.

Then in the midst of her tirade, the duke, roused without Bontet’s help, came out of his room, and waited a moment listening to the flow of the torrent.  And, strange as it seemed, he smiled at me and shrugged his shoulders, and I found myself smiling also; for disgusting as the woman was, she was amusing, too.  And the duke went and caught her by the shoulder and said: 

“Come, don’t be silly, mother.  We can settle our accounts with Mr. Aycon in another way than this.”

His touch and words seemed to sober her—­or perhaps her passion had run its course.  She turned to him, and her lips parted with a smile, a cunning and—­if my opinion be asked—­loathsome smile; and she caressed the lapel of his coat with her hand.  And the duke, who was smoking, smoked on, so that the smoke blew in her face, and she coughed and choked:  whereat the duke also smiled.  He set the right value on his instrument, and took pleasure in showing how he despised her.

“My dear, dear duke, I have such news for you—­such news?” she said, ignoring, as perforce she must, his rudeness.  “Come in here, and leave that man.”

At this the duke suddenly bent forward, his scornful, insolent toleration giving place to interest.

“News?” he cried, and he drew her toward the door to which she had been going, neither of them paying any more attention to me.  And the door closed upon them.