Mademoiselle sat down.- “You’re sordid,” she said, with disgust.

“Sordid, am I?” His thick lips curled again.  “I have had enough of the dregs of life, and so I should have thought have you.  You held a hand on which to have won a fortune if you had played it as I bade you.  Well, you’ve played it, and where’s the fortune?  We can whistle for that as a sailor whistles for wind.  And, by Heaven, we’ll need to whistle presently if the weather in the troupe continues as it’s set in.  That scoundrel Scaramouche has been at his ape’s tricks with them.  They’ve suddenly turned moral.  They won’t sit at table with me any more.”  He was spluttering between anger and sardonic mirth.  “It was your friend Scaramouche set them the example of that.  He threatened my life actually.  Threatened my life!  Called me...  Oh, but what does that matter?  What matters is that the next thing to happen to us will be that the Binet Troupe will discover it can manage without M. Binet and his daughter.  This scoundrelly bastard I’ve befriended has little by little robbed me of everything.  It’s in his power to-day to rob me of my troupe, and the knave’s ungrateful enough and vile enough to make use of his power.

“Let him,” said mademoiselle contemptuously.

“Let him?” He was aghast.  “And what’s to become of us?”

“In no case will the Binet Troupe interest me much longer,” said she.  “I shall be going to Paris soon.  There are better theatres there than the Feydau.  There’s Mlle. Montansier’s theatre in the Palais Royal; there’s the Ambigu Comique; there’s the Comedie Francaise; there’s even a possibility I may have a theatre of my own.”

His eyes grew big for once.  He stretched out a fat hand, and placed it on one of hers.  She noticed that it trembled.

“Has he promised that?  Has he promised?”

She looked at him with her head on one side, eyes sly and a queer little smile on her perfect lips.

“He did not refuse me when I asked it,” she answered, with conviction that all was as she desired it.

“Bah!” He withdrew his hand, and heaved himself up.  There was disgust on his face.  “He did not refuse!” he mocked her; and then with passion:  “Had you acted as I advised you, he would have consented to anything that you asked, and what is more he would have provided anything that you asked — anything that lay within his means, and they are inexhaustible.  You have changed a certainty into a possibility, and I hate possibilities — God of God!  I have lived on possibilities, and infernally near starved on them.”

Had she known of the interview taking place at that moment at the Chateau de Sautron she would have laughed less confidently at her father’s gloomy forebodings.  But she was destined never to know, which indeed was the cruellest punishment of all.  She was to attribute all the evil that of a sudden overwhelmed her, the shattering of all the future hopes she had founded upon the Marquis and the sudden disintegration of the Binet Troupe, to the wicked interference of that villain Scaramouche.