“Monsieur Melchior!” said Modeste again in a voice that asserted its right to be heard.

“What, mademoiselle?” demanded the poet.

Forced to rise, he remained standing half-way between the embroidery frame, which was near a window, and the fireplace where Modeste was seated with the Duchesse de Verneuil on a sofa.  What bitter reflections came into his ambitious mind, as he caught a glance from Eleonore.  If he obeyed Modeste all was over, and forever, between himself and his protectress.  Not to obey her was to avow his slavery, to lose the chances of his twenty-five days of base manoeuvring, and to disregard the plainest laws of decency and civility.  The greater the folly, the more imperatively the duchess exacted it.  Modeste’s beauty and money thus pitted against Eleonore’s rights and influence made this hesitation between the man and his honor as terrible to witness as the peril of a matador in the arena.  A man seldom feels such palpitations as those which now came near causing Canalis an aneurism, except, perhaps, before the green table, where his fortune or his ruin is about to be decided.

“Mademoiselle d’Herouville hurried me from the carriage, and I left behind me,” said Modeste to Canalis, “my handkerchief—­”

Canalis shrugged his shoulders significantly.

“And,” continued Modeste, taking no notice of his gesture, “I had tied into one corner of it the key of a desk which contains the fragment of an important letter; have the kindness, Monsieur Melchior, to get it for me.”

Between an angel and a tiger equally enraged Canalis, who had turned livid, no longer hesitated,—­the tiger seemed to him the least dangerous of the two; and he was about to do as he was told, and commit himself irretrievably, when La Briere appeared at the door of the salon, seeming to his anguished mind like the archangel Gabriel tumbling from heaven.

“Ernest, here, Mademoiselle de La Bastie wants you,” said the poet, hastily returning to his chair by the embroidery frame.

Ernest rushed to Modeste without bowing to any one; he saw only her, took his commission with undisguised joy, and darted from the room, with the secret approbation of every woman present.

“What an occupation for a poet!” said Modeste to Helene d’Herouville, glancing toward the embroidery at which the duchess was now working savagely.

“If you speak to her, if you ever look at her, all is over between us,” said the duchess to the poet in a low voice, not at all satisfied with the very doubtful termination which Ernest’s arrival had put to the scene; “and remember, if I am not present, I leave behind me eyes that will watch you.”