“Name of a pig!” said Leandre.  “How can you take your ease and smoke at such a time?”

Scaramouche surveyed the sky.  “I do not find it too cold,” said he.  “The sun is shining.  I am very well here.”

“Do I talk of the weather?” Leandre was very excited.

“Of what, then?”

“Of Climene, of course.”

“Oh!  The lady has ceased to interest me,” he lied.

Leandre stood squarely in front of him, a handsome figure handsomely dressed in these days, his hair well powdered, his stockings of silk.  His face was pale, his large eyes looked larger than usual.

“Ceased to interest you?  Are you not to marry her?”

Andre-Louis expelled a cloud of smoke.  “You cannot wish to be offensive.  Yet you almost suggest that I live on other men’s leavings.”

“My God!” said Leandre, overcome, and he stared awhile.  Then he burst out afresh.  “Are you quite heartless?  Are you always Scaramouche?”

“What do you expect me to do?” asked Andre-Louis, evincing surprise in his own turn, but faintly.

“I do not expect you to let her go without a struggle.”

“But she has gone already.”  Andre-Louis pulled at his pipe a moment, what time Leandre clenched and unclenched his hands in impotent rage.  “And to what purpose struggle against the inevitable?  Did you struggle when I took her from you?”

“She was not mine to be taken from me.  I but aspired, and you won the race.  But even had it been otherwise where is the comparison?  That was a thing in honour; this — this is hell.”

His emotion moved Andre-Louis.  He took Leandre’s arm.  “You’re a good fellow, Leandre.  I am glad I intervened to save you from your fate.”

“Oh, you don’t love her!” cried the other, passionately.  “You never did.  You don’t know what it means to love, or you’d not talk like this.  My God! if she had been my affianced wife and this had happened, I should have killed the man — killed him!  Do you hear me?  But you...  Oh, you, you come out here and smoke, and take the air, and talk of her as another man’s leavings.  I wonder I didn’t strike you for the word.”

He tore his arm from the other’s grip, and looked almost as if he would strike him now.

“You should have done it,” said Andre-Louis.  “It’s in your part.”

With an imprecation Leandre turned on his heel to go.  Andre-Louis arrested his departure.

“A moment, my friend.  Test me by yourself.  Would you marry her now?”

“Would I?” The young man’s eyes blazed with passion.  “Would I?  Let her say that she will marry me, and I am her slave.”

“Slave is the right word — a slave in hell.”

“It would never be hell to me where she was, whatever she had done.  I love her, man, I am not like you.  I love her, do you hear me?”

“I have known, it for some time,” said Andre-Louis.  “Though I didn’t suspect your attack of the disease to be quite so violent.  Well, God knows I loved her, too, quite enough to share your thirst for killing.  For myself, the blue blood of La Tour d’Azyr would hardly quench this thirst.  I should like to add to it the dirty fluid that flows in the veins of the unspeakable Binet.”