“Ventre bleu!” I said.

“And so you know not you little villain, whether you have a good master or not?”

“But how was I to dream it was monsieur?” I cried, confounded.  “I knew there was something queer about him—­about you, I mean—­about the person I took you for, that is.  I knew there was something wrong about you—­that is to say, I mean, I thought there was; I mean I knew he wasn’t what he seemed—­you were not.  And Peyrot fooled us, and I didn’t want to be fooled again.”

“Then I am a good master?” he demanded truculently, advancing upon me.

I put up my hands to my ears.

“The best, monsieur.  And monsieur wrestled well, too.”

“I can’t prove that by you, Felix,” he retorted, and laughed in my nettled face.  “Well, if you’ve not trampled on my jewels, I forgive your contumacy.”

If I had, my bare toes had done them no harm.  I crawled about the floor, gathering them all up and putting them on the bed, where I presently sat down myself to stare at him, trying to realize him for M. le Comte.  He had seated himself, too, and was dusting his trampled wig and clapping it on again.

He had shaved off his mustaches and the tuft on his chin, and the whole look of him was changed.  A year had gone for every stroke of the razor; he seemed such a boy, so particularly guileless!  He had stained his face so well that it looked for all the world as though the Southern sun had done it for him; his eyebrows and, lashes were dark by nature.  His wig came much lower over his forehead than did his own hair, and altered the upper part of his face as much as the shaving of the lower.  Only his eyes were the same.  He had had his back to the window at first, and I had not noted them; but now that he had turned, his eyes gleamed so light as to be fairly startling in his dark face—­like stars in a stormy sky.

“Well, then, how do you like me?”

“Monsieur confounds me.  It’s witchery.  I cannot get used to him.”

“That’s as I would have it,” he returned, coming over to the bedside to arrange his treasures.  “For if I look new to you, I think I may look so to the Hotel de Lorraine.”

“Monsieur goes to the Hotel de Lorraine as a jeweller?” I cried, enlightened.

“Aye.  And if the ladies do not crowd about me—­” he broke off with a gesture, and put his trays back in his box.

“Well, I wondered, monsieur.  I wondered if we were going to sell ornaments to Peyrot.”

He locked the box and proceeded solemnly and thoroughly to damn Peyrot.  He cursed him waking, cursed him sleeping; cursed him eating, cursed him drinking; cursed him walking, riding, sitting; cursed him summer, cursed him winter; cursed him young, cursed him old; living, dying, and dead.  I inferred that the packet had not been recovered.