“Nothing good,” replied Cerizet.  “After playing me a devilish trick which deprived me of a magnificent bit of business, our man rejected your overture with scorn.  There is no hope whatever in that claim of Dutocq’s; for la Peyrade is chock-full of money; he wanted to pay the notes just now, and to-morrow morning he will certainly do so.”

“Does he regard his marriage to this Demoiselle Colleville as a settled thing?”

“He not only considers it settled, but he is trying now to make people believe it is a love-match.  He rattled off a perfect tirade to convince me that he is really in love.”

“Very well,” said du Portail, wishing, perhaps, to show that he could, on occasion, use the slang of a low billiard-room, “‘stop the charge’” (meaning:  Do nothing more); “I will undertake to bring monsieur to reason.  But come and see me to-morrow, and tell me all about the family he intends to enter.  You have failed in this affair; but don’t mind that; I shall have others for you.”

So saying, he signed to the driver of an empty citadine, which was passing, got into it, and, with a nod to Cerizet, told the man to drive to the rue Honore-Chevalier.

As Cerizet walked down the rue Montmartre to regain the Estrapade quarter, he puzzled his brains to divine who that little old man with the curt speech, the imperious manner, and a tone that seemed to cast upon all those with whom he spoke a boarding-grapnel, could be; a man, too, who came from such a distance to spend his evening in a place where, judging by his clothes alone, he had no business to be.

Cerizet had reached the Market without finding any solution to that problem, when he was roughly shaken out of it by a heavy blow in the back.  Turning hastily, he found himself in presence of Madame Cardinal, an encounter with whom, at a spot where she came every morning to get fish to peddle, was certainly not surprising.

Since that evening in Toupillier’s garret, the worthy woman, in spite of the clemency so promptly shown to her, had judged it imprudent to make other than very short apparitions in her own domicile, and for the last two days she had been drowning among the liquor-dealers (called “retailers of comfort”) the pangs of her defeat.  With flaming face and thickened voice she now addressed her late accomplice:—­

“Well, papa,” she said, “what happened after I left you with that little old fellow?”

“I made him understand in a very few words,” replied the banker of the poor, “that it was all a mistake as to me.  In this affair, my dear Madame Cardinal, you behaved with a really unpardonable heedlessness.  How came you to ask my assistance in obtaining your inheritance from your uncle, when with proper inquiry you might have known there was a natural daughter, in whose favor he had long declared he should make a will?  That little old man, who interrupted you in your foolish attempt to anticipate your legacy, was no other than the guardian of the daughter to whom everything is left.”